Bettye LaVette: American Idol Singers Don't Deserve Overnight Fame

Bettye LaVette: American Idol Singers Don't Deserve Overnight Fame
June 15, 2009
by Michael Hogan
Vanity Fair

Bettye LaVette has become famous (at last) by singing unexpected songs. Her recent albums, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise (2005) and The Scene of the Crime (2007), feature songs by Dolly Parton, Elton John, and Fiona Apple, of all people. But with her new, iTunes-only EP (out Tuesday, June 16), she’s serving up more traditional fare: the title track is Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”—which LaVette sang with Jon Bon Jovi, of all people, at the Obama inauguration festivities back in January—and others in the collection were popularized by Thelonious Monk, Billie Holliday, and Bill Withers.

As you may know, LaVette spent four long decades waiting for her moment in the spotlight. At age 16, she had a hit with “My Man, He’s a Loving Man” (1962), but her next real break didn’t come for another 45 years (though she released plenty of records and even worked for six years on Broadway). Exile made her what she is today; you can hear it in her voice, fierce and emotionally singed, but also in her unvarnished opinions about the young singers on American Idol, who haven’t earned it yet, baby, but sure do think they have.

I recently had the chance to speak with Bettye, and found her to be great company: feisty, funny, and full of great stories. Here’s what she had to say.

VF Daily: So the new EP is named after “A Change is Gonna Come.” When did you first sing that song?

Bettye LaVette: Maybe a week after Sam [Cooke] did. I mean, it’s a song that everybody sung. I’m very happy about the resurgence of it and the recognition of it, but it wasn’t that big, you know, when it came out. It became much more significant after Sam died [in 1964, at the age of 33], but only because Sam had died. It was many years later that somebody, probably somebody white, associated it with the Civil Rights struggle. And now it’s turned into something else. But I’m very glad that it did, because it’s Sam’s song.

Did you know Sam personally?

No, not as an adult, but as a child I lived in Muskegon, Michigan, during segregation, and he was with the Soulsters Soul Stirrers. And if you came to Muskegon to do one of those gospel performances, you couldn’t just drop by in a bar if you were black. So after the performance, you had to come to my house to have a drink or listen to the jukebox and dance. And my mother sold fried chicken sandwiches and barbecue sandwiches, and they listened to the jukebox and drank and sang. I was a very small child then, but those were the people who came by my house.

Many years later, Otis Redding sang the song as well, and you were close with Otis, right?

Yeah, we were both new people at Atlantic together. At that time, companies usually put a lot of their artists together, you know, so I was working a lot with whoever Atlantic had at the time, and I was new, and he was new, in terms of really recording or being heard nationally.

What was your impression of him at that time?

Just a wonderful, wonderful, warm person, and just a big country boy.

So it’s true what Carla Thomas told him in “Tramp”? He was country?

Well, yeah, he was very, very country. I probably would have been as attracted to him as he was to me had I not thought myself so sophisticated, but I was as northern stupid as he was country dumb. I just didn’t know it.

You sang “A Change is Gonna Come” with Jon Bon Jovi at the inauguration party in Washington, D.C. What was that like for you?

It was absolutely wonderful. I was there, being seen by more people than had ever seen me in my life—something that I had been working on trying to get done for all of the new president’s life! And I was there with the first black president, standing at the feet of Abraham Lincoln. It was overwhelming.

Did you meet the president?

Yes, he had a short little audience with all of the entertainers after the performance. He and his wife both are people who, the moment you approach them, they reach for you. They don’t stick their hands out; they reach for you. They were both extremely gracious, and the president assured that he was a lover of entertainment, and that he understood that we worked, as well.

You said the song means a lot to different people. What would you say it means to you now?

I don’t know. You’re trying to take me into some kind of spiritual fantasy kind of thing, and the song—I don’t want to say anything that isn’t really, really good, but it’s not gooey and dreamy and prophetic and whatever, to me. It’s a beautiful song, and Sam sang it better than anyone I’ve heard so far.

Did you see Adam Lambert sing it on American Idol?

Mm-hm.

What’d you think of that?

Oh, it was O.K. I don’t think very much of kids who do what I do. To do it as well as I do it when you’re only 20 years old, you have to be a genius, and there aren’t so many geniuses out there. It took me 30 or 40 years to be who I am now. I think they’re cute; I’m not thrilled about them being given whole careers in 13 weeks—I kind of resent that. They’re all extremely talented, but I don’t see that any of them got to be in 13 weeks what Frank Sinatra got to be in 25 or 30 years. So for them to be afforded every gratuity that being a star affords you is I don’t think deserved.

Maybe if they had to work a little harder, they might ease up on the vibrato?

Oh, yeah. You know, I would fear any of those little girls having to come on behind Tina Turner. I’ve been telling this story recently because of the American Idol thing, about when I was working at Small’s Paradise [in Harlem]. I was with Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford—I was a band singer with them in 1963—and one night Big Maybelle came into Small’s. Of course I had heard of her, but I’d never seen her. She was always having bouts with drugs and whatever, and she had just left another hospital—had just gotten up and left—so she had on these paper shoes and had some shawl or blanket wrapped around her and this big hat with a feather in it.

And I was laughing, of course. Me with my two-inch waist and big booty and loud voice, I just thought she was hilarious. And honey, girlfriend went up on the stage and sung “Candy” with my band. And the people wouldn’t even let me back on to do my little set. It was disgraceful, and that was exactly what should have happened to someone who was—I think I was 18. But you don’t live in doorways and get strung out on heroin and get kicked out of bars and get denied your career for 20 or 30 years, and then some little broad with a big booty come and kick yo’ ass.

But I feel that these people on American Idol who are becoming huge stars in 13 weeks, it’s tantamount to holding the other people down while you beat them up, and I can’t get with it.

What did you think of the notion that Adam Lambert’s version of the song was connected with the gay-rights movement?

That’s what you need to do. You need to find the thing that makes it hurt for you. To sing somebody else’s feeling is very, very difficult. It’s impossible, I think. I’m sure that that would be where he would have to go to get something that would make him sing the song poignantly. I thought he sung it well. But it was just a little over the top.

Your recent albums remind me a bit of Johnny Cash’s later work, where he left Nashville and recorded offbeat songs for an independent label. Is he a model for you?

You know, I’ve had more Beatles songs in my show than probably any other black person you’ve ever known. I’ve always sung just what I like. When I hear a song, if I like it, I sing it.

But on the new EP, you sing jazz and soul classics, which might seem more expected.

Well, all this while, that y’all weren’t hearing about me, these are the songs I was doing for $50 a night. I was working in places where maybe it was just me and my keyboard player. So these are songs that I’ve always done, other than “A Change is Gonna Come.”

My manager, Jim Lewis, who has now passed away but who got me around 1967, agreed that my waistline was small and my booty was big, but he told me I couldn’t sing. And I’m like, “But I’ve got a record in the chart,” and he said, “That’s cause everybody doesn’t know you can’t sing. But if these records don’t sell, you’re gonna have to know how to sing.” And I was of course resentful, and hostile. I had a record selling, that was in the charts, and he took me to see Billy Eckstine, and Billy Eckstine hadn’t had a damn record in 20 years. And Jim took me to the dressing room and said, “Billy, I want you to meet a young lady who wants to be a singer.” Oh, it broke my heart. And I couldn’t say anything.

But Jim showed me how I could always sing. He said, “Just keep learning songs. Any song you like. Any song. Don’t make no difference which song it is.” I had records with people the whole while I was with him, but he didn’t think very much of them. And as it turns out, he was right.

Anyone who knows anything about you knows that you’re 63 years old and still a size 6. What are your fitness secrets?

When I was waiting for all of what happened in the last six years to happen, I was working out every day. And then I was working in my yard, I was cutting the hedges. All this stuff is kind of like farm work, so it’s very good for the triceps and the stomach muscles. And I know that keeping the stomach muscles and the back muscles are what keep your voice together. People don’t realize that it’s a physical activity. When you go see somebody and everybody says, “Oh, well, he doesn’t sound like he used to sound,” it’s because they let their stomach and back muscles go. So I try to keep those together, so that I can holler real loud, in case I have to cuss anybody out.

And I wear the size 6 just for meanness. Many of the things I’ve done in the last 40 years to keep myself fit, they were really done for vengeance. Sometimes I would be working out, and tears would be running down my eyes. It was like, “Nobody’s gonna call anyway, but God damn it if they do, I’m gonna look great.”