Bettye Lavette

BETTYE LAVETTE BIO

Bettye is one of the most incredible R&B singers singing today.”
— BONNIE RAITT

With the arrival of her new CD Scene Of The Crime, due out September 25, 2007 on Anti-Records, the flinty, intense soul stylist BETTYE LAVETTE unleashes a set of aggressive, sublimely crafted songs that are nothing short of mesmerizing.

LaVette is considered one of the greatest soul singers in American music history, possessed of an incredibly expressive voice that one moment will exude strength and intensity, and the next moment will appear vulnerable, reflective, reeking of heartbreak. Unfortunately, it says much about the vagaries of the popular music industry that, although LaVette has been recording for over four decades, up until recently she has remained criminally unknown.

On her new Anti release, Scene Of The Crime, LaVette is accompanied by the freewheeling renegade Southern rock band Drive By Truckers. The release is a multifaceted gem, ablaze with the unusual light cast by LaVette’s complex layers of wrath, reflection and resolve. Recorded in the classic soul mine of Muscle Shoals’ FAME Studios, the set is fraught with dire psychological elements. Scene Of The Crime represents a volatile bid to dispel the shadow still cast by LaVette’s simmering frustration over her stillborn Muscle Shoals-recorded 1972 masterpiece Child of the Seventies, an album that Atlantic Records maddeningly – and inexplicably – shelved before anyone heard it.

LaVette’s vocals, a richly calculated union of blunt force trauma and unspeakable tenderness, boil over with long-carried need to flout that blow. Using a hand-picked set of titles by a diverse set of writers (from Willie Nelson to Elton John) LAVETTE foments another artistic revolution as she quells an aching personal thwart. Her revelatory, communicative performances confront decades of aggravation and disappointment not with bitterness, but upright defiance. The Scene Of The Crime equation is enhanced further by contributions from two Muscle Shoals mainstays, keyboardist Spooner Oldham and bassist David Hood (who just happens to be father of Drive By Truckers guitarist Patterson Hood), and the sound achieved – gritty, restrained, fuzz-gilded, deep soul-rock grooves – provides ideal support.


The result of this striking convergence is profound, a resonant, emotional conquest of forty five years of hurt and bad memories. LaVette is captured in full fury, cementing the promise of 2005’s extraordinary CD I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, a glorious reintroduction of LaVette which also re-asserted her as one of America’s most forceful and accomplished soul singers, winning LaVette a long overdue measure of recognition.

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