Bettye Lavette has a life that comes to the front on every story she sings, and she makes others’ stories her own as well. Growing up in Detroit, Bettye was there when Berry Gordy was selling records out of the trunk of his car. It’s all in her engaging life story, A Woman Like Me, written with David Ritz. Her musical producer, Steve Jordan, has worked with Bettye to give songs she selects a unique Bettye Lavette interpretation. Jordan says, “Bettye is a combination of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.” Her new recording, LaVette!, takes songs written by Randall Bramblett and makes them seem like he wrote those stories just for her.
Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Bettye about her life, and the new recording, which comes to life July 7 at The Winery in NYC, and July 11 at The Vogel at The Count Basie Center For The Arts in Red Bank, N.J.
Listen to our conversation, above.
Interview transcript:
What a life story. If you want to read everything that goes into every lyric that this lady sings, you want to pick up a book that she did with David Ritz called A Woman Like Me. But we're here today to talk about a brand-new recording where Bettye continues her association with Steve Jordan, who also does the drumming. He says, “I couldn't find a cheaper drummer than me, so I'll play,” but he also produced the recording as well. This is third recording together, I believe. It is a barn burner as only Bettye LaVette could do.
Thank you. I told Steven, “You do understand you aren't supposed to treat old people like this, don't you?” I love this album, Gary. I absolutely love it. When I look at really tight, short dresses now, I know I can't wear them, but I love them. I said, Steven, “If you are in the audience anywhere, I am calling you up.” These rhythms and these tempos show that he's built a component into every song that old folks can walk to.
But some old folks, they're going to stand by and listen because the stories that you tell are heartfelt, just like you did where you took the music of Bob Dylan and it became the music of Bettye LaVette. This is the case with this recording and a cat that some of us know. If you're familiar with the Allman Brothers, Elvin Bishop and the group Sea Level, you know the name Randall Bramlett. He wrote all the tunes on this recording. Randall may be a stranger to you folks, but not a stranger to Bettye, because she did a tune on a 2015 recording called “Where a Life Goes” and the record was nominated for Grammy Award for the Best Blues Recording of the Year. What was it about Randall Bramlett that first attracted you to his storytelling?
Well, I'm always attracted by melodies. I was doing a gig with Randall eight years ago when I came into the gig. He was on the stage, just he and a guitar, and I fell in love with the melodies as I was coming up the steps. I didn't know what he was saying really. I asked my road manager to catch him when he came off and ask him if he would come to the dressing room. He did, and I told him how much I love the melodies. I told him that sometimes I'll get caught in situations where I fall in love with melodies and then the words don't hold up. I'm sure I chose the words better in speaking to him. I said, “Would you let other people do your tunes?” He said, “If they will.” I asked him, “Would you send me some of them?” He sent me about five tunes and I did two of them right away with Joe Henry. We were working on album and then my husband, who loves music way more than I do, he had Randall send me some more tunes. Randall sent about 15 tunes or so, and I picked all 15.
When I let Steve Jordan and his partner wife Megan Boss listen to them, they liked all of them. We narrowed it down to those songs that we made the album of. But I think he's a brilliant writer. We're about the same age, we've had the same kind of careers. He's had all these albums. None of them have sold. Everybody thinks he's the greatest writer and just a brilliant individual. Everybody thinks I'm the greatest interpreter.
People keep asking, “Did you write the songs or did he write them for you?” Neither is true. He wrote them for me, but he did not know he was writing them for me because we didn't know each other. But if I could write, this is exactly what I would say. The lyrics just fall out of my mouth just the way I'm talking to you right now. They just sounded natural. Then when I told him I was going to do the album, he said, “You’re going to do all my songs?” I said, “Yea.” He said, “Who does that?”
Bettye LaVette does that. They sound like your tunes though.
He told me, “Do anything that you want.” I've changed a lot of words, but not the gist of the tune. Actually, I had to change the gist of a lot of them because different things happen to men that don't happen to women, like in the song, “Hard to Be a Human.” It was me with the apple in my hand. He was singing about the chick with the apple in the hand so I had to change it a little and do a lot of juxtaposing like that. He told me, “If it sings out of your mouth, then change it.” He gave me that liberty.
He’s just such a brilliant writer to me. He really is. What he writes, you can see what's happening in the song. It’s like little vignettes. You can see what's happening. I love that so much because in my 62 years, I've never sung “Widow Man” in my life other than Don Gardner and Deedee Ford. I've been fortunate enough to always have my band. The things I've learned along the way, I get a chance to exercise all of those things that I've learned in this album because he is gone the same route and he writes that way. There are all kinds of tunes on this album, yet it’s not a mishmash. It's consistent and cohesive.
In your case, talking about all the things that you've learned, that would include traveling the country with some of the heroes that you grew up with in Detroit, on Broadway in Bubblin’ Brown Sugar because you were the only one that could stand up there and do that kind of thing. And then reimagining, later on, on one of your records “Blackbird.” You talked about personalizing a tune like taking the Paul McCartney composition “Blackbird” and making it a very personal story.
Well, I was singing what he was talking about. It was the same thing with Bob Dylan who’s always talking about something. It's not about him. And in the case of “Blackbird” there's no way that song could have been about him or any Beatle. In Britain they called their women birds. When I did listen to it, (I had never heard it before), that somebody he's talking about is me.
And racial equality.
It seemed more personal than a social statement. It seemed as if one person was saying it and I was glad for the opportunity to be the person he was talking about in the song.
As Bob Dylan would say, “Go away from my window and leave at your own chosen speed.” Go at Bettye LaVette speed. You say that you're on your fourth or fifth career and there's a tune on this new record LaVette!, which has just come out, called “Plan B,” and there's a lyric in it, “Hell, I ain't done with Plan A.”
Well, that’s true.
You’ve got an all-star cast here. Steve Jordan gave you the ultimate compliment when he said Bettye LaVette is a combination of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis. My goodness. Talk about high praise. On this new recording, it's an all-star cast including Pino Paladino on the bass, Larry Campbell and Chris Bruce on guitars, Leon Pendarvis is on keyboards. John Mayer and Jon Batiste are there. Steve Winwood. Ray Parker, Jr., the Reverend Charles Hodges, a fellow Detroiter named James Carter and Pedrito Martinez, who is on the first track, “See Through Me.” Larry Campbell does some fine guitar work on that one.
It is beyond fine. They just played. I am so flattered, so many emotions are happening at this moment. Yesterday Steven and I were in Times Square looking at the LaVette! cover go up on the big billboard in the middle of Times Square. We were there to do a video and they're taking pictures of Steven and I standing there pointing at it. I was telling Steven, “There's me, 50 feet tall, looking down on the actual scene of the crime.” When I arrived there in Central Park in Times Square to go farther up to 50-something Street to tell Jerry Wexler, “I want a release from my contract because my friends have told me that you aren't doing what you're supposed to do.”
She's talking about some of her early music, “My Man, He’s a Lovin’ Man.” You would think growing up in Detroit, that'd be a Motown record, but you have to understand what was happening in 1962. You know the big label was Atlantic Records. Hell, even Barry Gordy wanted to be on Atlantic Records, because at that time he was selling records out of the trunk of his car. Being signed to Atlantic was quite a coup and this all comes from a lady whose first exposure was in her parents' home. They kind of had their own little club there, right?
It's hard for you to imagine that as you're trying to have your listeners imagine that time for me. It was 1946 in Western Michigan. You could count all the Blacks who were there in Muskegon Heights. They happened to mostly be from Louisiana, which was where all my cousins and friends and everybody, even if you weren't related, if you're from Louisiana, you’re cousins.
All these people worked together every day and they couldn't go anywhere after that. They couldn't go to any restaurant, they could not go to any nightclub, nothing that was inside. But my mother and father who had worked with them all day, came home, made these chicken sandwiches, fried chicken sandwiches, barbecue sandwiches, and these pints and shots and half pints of corn liquor.
We had a jukebox in the living room where everybody else has a couch and little tables. You cannot come there with anyone other than your known girlfriend or your wife. You cannot hang out there. No one could curse with my mother, although she did it proficiently and taught me how to do it and I loved it. And they all went to work. They never missed a day's work. It was like New Orleans on Sunday morning when everybody says, “Ah, it was a hangover breath.” Maybe everyone had a hangover, but they were at work. They didn't miss a day's work. It wasn't a joint so they sat me on the jukebox in my diaper. I knew all the songs. My mother said she doesn't remember when I didn't know how to talk exactly like this.
Your mom's joint had quite a reputation. I'm talking people like Sam Cooke would come through while he was on the road.
They knew Sam Cooke before because they knew the Soul Stirrers. So when they hired Sam, I'm just guessing Sam probably had performed in Chicago the night before, which was right across Lake Michigan from Muskegon. When they came to Muskegon, my sister was a teenager and she was in love with him and my mother and father were in love with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.
Clarence Fountain of the Five Blind Boys.
The first gig that I did when “My Man” came out, I was in Kansas City and Archie Brownlee came. They were on the show and I went to the dressing room later and they remembered my parents. They acted just as if I was their long lost child, because they hadn't seen me since I was 18 months old. I was on the show with them, with a recording and they remembered my parents. I called my mother on the phone and they both cried and talked to each other and that was one of the greatest moments of my life. My father had passed away, but my mother and he talked on the phone.
What a life. We're chatting with Bettye LaVette and when you hear about this life, when you read about it in A Woman Like Me, her autobiography with David Ritz, it kind of lends the fact that there's a sense of humor in this one tune that's on your new recording LaVette! called “Lazy.”
I took this tune out of the list to record maybe five times, maybe 10 times, because there's always been this false association with laziness and Blacks. It's really hard to be lazy if you're a slave. I don't even know how that got started, but I didn't want to do that song for that reason. But then I thought about it and thought about being in show business. I work really hard when I'm on the stage and I worked really hard for these 62 years, but I'm spoiled. I'm extremely spoiled. Show business does that to you. Where else do you go where everybody's looking at you? The whole room is looking at you, and then they all want to go where you are going or whatever, whether there's 25 people in a club or 25,000 in a stadium. I am extremely spoiled and my parents adored me. I was spoiled and show business has spoiled me. There are myriad things that I get a chance to do that most people don't get a chance to do.
But this has always been right in front of you. When I look at one of the other tunes on this record, “Plan B” I get the feeling that for Bettye LaVette, there's never been a Plan B. It's just been the continuum of Plan A.
That's it. Honey, could you send out some notices because you're spot on? That is exactly it. I never wanted to be a child. I always wanted to cuss and to wear sunglasses. I always wanted to drink and smoke. Well, I'm not smoking a cigarette here for everybody's health concerns. They allowed me in 1962 to change my name from Betty Jo Haskins, which was not as conducive to being who I wanted to be, but that was my trouble in school everywhere. I've always wanted to be a grown person in a black dress who cussed and smoked and drank. It was just all I wanted to do.
It was all around you early on.
Right. I've been fortunate enough, so I'm spoiled. I'm not lazy. I refuse to do anything else because I don't do anything else as well as I do this. I wouldn't want to go and do something that I don't do this well.
As I listen to this recording, this is a real departure for you in some ways musically. I'm thinking about the tune “Mess About It.” At one point in the tune, I'm just waiting for you to yell out for Maceo because it's got that James Brown kind of funkiness to it.
My opening tune in 1965 was “Shotgun” by Junior Walker. No, this is not a departure for me. I had to learn how to sing the slow songs and learn how to do an album like the one that I did before. I was never a band singer. The first time I ever walked on a stage in my life was the first time I ever walked on a stage in my life. I had never stood before a microphone. The first night, trying to sell the first record, “My Man,” I had been doing little record hops pantomining with the record, but this is the first night I was going to sing the record with the band.
I mean, everybody went up. Marvin Gaye, was there to do the record hop per se. I walked on the stage and the band said, “Count it off.” I had no idea. And Marvin Gaye was sitting there at the edge of the stage and the stage was about three feet up, and he said, “One, two, three.” When they started, I was good, but I didn't know how to start them. I had been singing one week and I was on Atlantic, and the record was the most ridiculously phenomenal thing.
Here we are 60 years later with LaVette! and it has all these wonderful stories that you tell—the sad stories, the up stories, the kind of tongue in cheek stories. The tune “Concrete Mind” with some wonderful vibraphone work from Monte Croft, who's on this recording, Ray Parker Jr's guitar and one of New Orleans's favorite sons, Jon Batiste. Oh, wonderful piano work.
Ray Jr. was in my band, The Fun Company, when he was about 18 in Detroit and Jon Batiste’s father was in my band when he was about 18 when I lived in New Orleans.
Quite a story, and it's all contained in this new recording, simply called LaVette! We talked about Jon Batiste. You know that second line feel comes to the forefront on the tune, “Hard to be a Human” with Sonny Rollins’ nephew Clifton Anderson on the trombone and a cat from Detroit on the baritone sneaking through there, James Carter.
Here we go again. He [Carter] was getting ready to graduate high school and started coming to see Rudy Robinson and I perform as a duo, while I waited for the next thing to happen. He kept coming by and everybody was so taken with his playing and I started to tell him, “If you can play me a proficient solo on “Every Day I Have the Blues” then we’ll see. He started coming and just aced it. I kept telling him, “You should go to New York. You should really go to New York.” I spoke with his mother at one point and she said, “Don't make my baby try to go to New York,” but he did. And then Steve Winwood covered “Let Me Down” when he was 18.
Steve Winwood is featured on “Don't Get Me Started,” and I believe on some of the recording, he's just one of the organists. The Reverend Charles Hodges is another, and those were recorded by Boo Mitchell. Who's Boo Mitchell? You may know the name Willie Mitchell. That's his son. The legacy in Memphis is also part of the roux that ends up being LaVette.
Steven has been saying that the album is magical. So many things area have just happened and they’re pleasant and wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
Randall was in Steven's band for a while in the late nineties, I believe.
I know. That's what I'm telling you. It's ridiculous. It's totally ridiculous.
You brought the family together and it wasn't always that easy.
It was my family.
When this recording first started to take shape. We were in the throes of COVID and the initial get together was all done for the most part virtually.
We were lucky that the original get-together, which we always do here at my house, where I cooked something. I'm the first in my family to be born in Michigan. Everybody else was born in Louisiana so cooking is this natural thing. As a result, we usually get it together here and I stopped listening to the tunes way before we recorded them because I don't want any suggestions or ideas, anything.
I have the songs in my head. When Steven and Ken and Larry came here I said, “This is how I want it.” We've sent them the recordings of the original song and I said, “This is how I want to sing it.” I sang it acapella.” Then everybody chooses their part. Nothing is written out. He accompanies me on that and everybody says, “This is what I want to play on drums with that. This is what I want to play on bass with that.” Everybody chooses what they want to play.
Let me tell you something folks. As wonderful as this new recording is there is nothing that compares with seeing Bettye LaVette in performance, and your chance to see her is coming up on July 7 in New York City at the City Winery and the next night in Philadelphia's City Winery. Then, for folks in Jersey, she’ll be at the Vogel at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank. These are just some of the things she's going to be doing. She'll also be in the nation's Capital at a place called the Hamilton, and it's all around this new recording entitled LaVette!. I'm not going to waste my love, as Randall Bramlett might say. She brought that one to life. I think that was a demo recording. I don't think he ever recorded that.
Steven had been saying, “This may be a very good thing that the songs aren't so well known.” Because people tend to compare the things that I've done, like The Interpretations album and “Blackbird.” I really don't get that because I'm a singer and the songs are written for singers. So if Michael Jackson did 'em, if I did them when people used to sing from sheet music. Go see the one you liked singing it, but I hate the word covers because as far as I know, Pat Boone is the cover artist, and I'm a song interpreter. I think that's what you should know how to do and learn how to do as a singer. Express your own thing in the song
Regardless of who wrote the song, things have changed. That collection of Dylan tunes, you would think Bettye LaVette wrote all those tunes because those stories come from so deep inside that even Dylan's own manager, when he heard the tunes, didn’t recognize them. That's the ultimate compliment when you are not covering a song, but making a song your own.
Yes. I wouldn't sing it if I couldn't. When I recorded “My Man” in 1962, Johnny Mathis said, “My Man. I said, “My Man.” He said, “He's a whole lot of man. I'd only been singing at that point for 5 days, so I had no ideas of my own.
It must've been something sitting on that jukebox in those diapers.
I just absorbed all that music. I told my audience about the jukebox thing and another thing. I had on a diaper, and maybe a little t-shirt, and they would hold my t-shirt up and I could roll my stomach all the way down in time with the music and roll it all the way back up. I always tell the audience that will not be forthcoming this evening, but I just wanted you to know that I did it. No one taught me to do that. However, the rhythm went. I could just roll my stomach all the way up and roll it all the way down.
I want to say before we wrap it up here today, congratulations to you and your partner and your husband Kevin, because also in the month of July, you will be celebrating your 20th wedding anniversary.
Our 22nd anniversary. Only my drummer has been working with me longer. I want everybody to know I've had a career of a lot of doom and gloom, but I am so happy right now. I'm just really comfortable and happy and grateful.
The highs and the lows, it's all part of Plan A for Betty.
That's it.
As you're in your seventies now and you have this brand new recording out, which is just a monster. Is there anything in your sights that you would like to do that you have yet to do?
Not anything that I have yet to do yet, other than make some money. Somebody was asking me last night at this thing Steven and I did, “Do you think we'll ever see you at the Carlyle again?” I said, “Honey, if it was left to me when I leave here this evening, I would be going to the Carlyle.” I don’t want the kids’ gig. I do not want to pack Yankee Stadium. I want you to pay. There's not a tab that goes out of the Carlyle that's under $500.
You know what? I'll bet Eartha Kitt would want you to have that gig.
We have a birthday that we share and I absolutely adore her and I would have loved to sing with her. When I lived here, I've been kicked out of New York five times in these 62 years, and I used to walk past the Carlyle to stand there and stare. The doorman would say, “Ma’am, you go. You have to move. You can't stand here.” I have done two residencies there now.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
