WHEN Bettye LaVette starts to sing, you know you're in for something special. There are some things that never go out of fashion, so there will always be a place at the table for a soul belter like her.
There she was last week on Later with Jools Holland, plugging her extraordinary I've Got My Own Hell to Raise album and causing the hairs on the back of your neck to rise. It may have been a long time coming, but this album could well be the highlight of LaVette's 43-year career.
Lets be honest here. There are countless other belters out there with similar stories to tell. Like LaVette, they're singers who can take songs you thought you knew so darn well and spin them in dozens of directions, leaving you staggering.
Like LaVette, they've had moments throughout their career when they really believed that good luck was just around the corner. Like her, all those wrong turns led to more dead-end alleys and they're now singing for their suppers in gin joints and supper clubs rather than gracing grand stages and filling glitzy ballrooms.
LaVette has had her share of marked cards these past four decades. Despite dalliances with major and minor labels, the Detroit lady remained a cult singer who would occasionally trouble the lower depths of the pop charts with such songs as the show- stopping Let Me Down Easy or the sultry He Made a Woman.
She became the woman that folk would call if they wanted a cover version to cross all manner of borders in search of true musical voodoo and gritty soul. Because of this, she saw herself as more of an editor than a writer. "I can rarely ever think of a story I want to write myself," she says. "If you make a state- ment, I can make it a stronger statement and if you write a story, I can make it a stronger story."
What changed for LaVette was the arrival of this big tall fellow from Anti Records at one of her live shows. Andy Kaulkin loved what he heard and thought LaVette should cut an album on which all the songs had been written by women. He rounded up Joe Henry to produce the sessions, booked the studio and waited for LaVette to say thanks.
Her response to this idea was somewhat different: "Hell no, I didn't want to do it at all. I just felt that a woman would write songs that would be too pitiful and they wouldn't be exactly what I wanted to say."
It took a lot of persuasion to change LaVette's mind. Then came a bundle of listening sessions to whittle down a lengthy list of possible songs and the album began to take shape. LaVette didn't bother with soul or r'n'b tunes (that would have been too easy and straightforward, she said) and instead tucked into country, rock and traditional singer-songwriter fare.
The results are masterful. In LaVette's hands, songs you know and love by Lucinda Williams, Fiona Apple, Sinéad O'Connor, Joan Armatrading and Aimee Mann are transformed into epics of hurt and redemption.
Have a listen to O'Connor's I Do Not Want I Haven't Got and revel in what the veteran with the smoky voice found buried between the folds of the verse and chorus. There's a similar magic to behold in Joy and Only Time Will Tell Me, LaVette using these songs to tell her own stories of hard luck and determination.
Of course, it remains to be seen if this really is a new beginning. Selling a veteran soul rasper to an audience sated by innocuous, inoffensive, market-friendly r'n'b princesses will certainly not be easy. LaVette, of course, will give it everything she has got, and there will always be media nooks and crannies like Later prepared to give her a welcome.
What I Have My Own Hell to Raise shows, though, is that you just can't write off someone like Bettye LaVette. Hope, then, for all those other soul growlers waiting in the shadows with their own tales to tell.
I've Got My Own Hell to Raise is out now on Anti Records
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)