Bettye LaVette

by Jason Ankeny
A perennial cult favorite in Northern soul circles, singer Bettye LaVette was born in Muskegon, MI, on January 29, 1946. Raised primarily across the state in Detroit, at 16 she cut her first sides for the local Lupine label, with a test pressing of the disc making its way to Atlantic Records. After signing with Atlantic, she scored an R&B Top Ten hit out of the box with her debut single, My Man — Hes a Loving Man, only to fail to reach the same commercial heights again. After one more Atlantic release, 1963s Youll Never Change, LaVette moved back to Lupine for her third record, Witchcraft in the Air. After a stint as a featured vocalist with the Don Gardner & Dee Dee Ford Revue, she recorded the long-unreleased One Thin Dime for Scepter before resurfacing on Calla with the 1965 lost classic Let Me Down Easy, her only other record to crack the R&B Top 20. Two more Calla efforts — the fine Only Your Love Can Save Me and Im Just a Fool for You — preceded a shift to Big Wheel, where after just one single, Im Holding On, LaVette again moved along, this time to the Karen imprint for Hey Love.
Following stays at Silver Fox (He Made a Woman Out of Me, Do Your Duty), SSS International (Take Another Piece of My Heart), and her own TCA imprint (Never My Love), LaVette returned to Atlantic, signing to their Atco division for 1972s Neil Young cover Heart of Gold. An LP, Child of the Seventies, was also recorded at Muscle Shoals Studios, but Atco opted against its release after the failure of the single Your Turn to Cry (the album was reissued, complete with bonus tracks, in limited copies by Rhino in 2006). After joining the touring company of the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar, LaVette briefly signed to West End for a disco effort, 1978s Doin the Best I Can.
She did not record again until 1982, landing at Motown and rechristening herself Bettye. However, despite a heavy promotional push, neither the LP Tell Me a Lie nor the single Right in the Middle (Of Falling in Love) proved her long-awaited chart breakthrough, and outside of a handful of recordings for Motor City during the 1990s, she focused primarily on live appearances in the years to follow. The 2000s found her in the recording studio more frequently with new albums A Woman Like Me being released by the Blues Express label in 2003 followed by Ive Got My Own Hell to Raise in 2005 on the Anti label. In 2006, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, a collection of Silver Fox singles as well as other material, all of which had been recorded in Memphis between 1969 and 1970, came out on Varèse Sarabande. The Scene of the Crime appeared on Anti in 2007.