Bettye LaVette (Courtesy photo)
Sometime during the middle of her set at the Bull Run in Shirley, the soul singer Bettye LaVette asked, almost incredulously, “Where are we?” The audience laughed knowingly, because the location that night was certainly a byway in an itinerant career that’s included a top-ten single and performances at the Kennedy Center and at President Obama’s inauguration. Behind the easy laugh of ‘Gosh, here I am in the sticks,’ however, was something deeper and more profound: genuine wonderment at the place she’s come to inhabit in her life and in her career as well as a challenge to the audience to follow along.
Backed by a crack four-piece band, Ms. LaVette was sensational. Celebrating 50 years as a performer, Bettye LaVette is no oldies act, serving warmed-over memories to a sing-along audience. A generous artist, Ms. LaVette is not given to usual tropes that separate an artist from the audience. Think James Brown at his finest but without the melodrama, a living, breathing woman who’s lived a life, been around the block, and has a story or two to tell. The stories came in her introductions to each song and from the songs themselves, an eclectic mix that included Neal Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” and The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me,” the show’s highlight. To say that she made each song hers is an understatement, mingling heartbreak with wisdom, loss with humor. After a song was completed and she was drained from the exertion, her visits to a chair next to her keyboardist for a sip of water and a towel for her brow were like a boxer heading to the corner at the end of a grueling round.
Ms. LaVette’s recordings are fine documents of her art. But to really experience the force of nature that is Bettye Lavette ,you had to be at an outpost called Shirley on a Friday night and feel very fortunate indeed.
Mario Cardenas is a sound recordist and a resident of Oak Hill Road.
