Bettye LaVette

This is the moment—the record, the book, the culmination of a lifetime of near-triumphs. This is Bettye LaVette’s triumphant year, her 50th in show business.
“Miss LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as this generation’s most vital soul singer,” proclaims the New York Times.
“With a voice as powerful as Etta James and a story as compelling as Tina Turner,” says one Rolling Stone writer, “LaVette is embracing the superstar status that has eluded her since the sixties. Justice has been served. Her time has finally come.”
Two major creative endeavors—a brilliantly reflective album, Thankful N’ Thoughtful, and a riveting autobiography, A Woman Like Me—will be released this fall. Together, they present Bettye at the top of her form, an artist with the unflinching courage to confront her past while reshaping her future.
At the heart of the Bettye LaVette story, whether sung as a song or narrated in a book, is the notion of creative survival. It is her voice that both announces and insures that survival; it is her voice that, no matter how dire the circumstances, lets you know that she will not be denied. It is her voice that compels you to listen to every word she says, sings or writes. That voice—rough, tender, sensuous and soaring—is an instrument of inspiration.
“Like all voices,” says Bettye, “mine has changed over the years. I’d like to think that the change has to do with wisdom. I’m far more selective about what songs I’ll sing. If I can’t re-sculpt them and, in many instances actually reinvent them to be part of my story, I can’t make them come to life.”
Bettye LaVette’s life story is nothing short of miraculous.
“I’ve been wanting to tell this story for years,” says the singer, “but I now I realize I had to live more of that life before it was time to write it down. It was all unplanned—as was everything in my career—but as I was writing A Woman Like Me, I was actually re-living many of those experiences in the songs of Thankful N’ Thoughtful. The two projects spoke to each other. As I wrote my life, I was singing my life. One helped me understand the other.”
LaVette’s explorations into, as one book critic put it, “the back room of her soul,” are adventures in the art of self-definition.
Who is she?
“A better question,” says Bettye, “is who was I? A sixteen-year-old girl from Detroit with a hit on Atlantic Records in 1962. I was a woman-child certain that the floodgates had opened and stardom was mine. I thought I was ahead of my Motown friends. I wasn’t on a local label. I had a national record company behind me, the people who had made stars of Ruth Brown and Ray Charles. But circumstances bit me in the ass. Stardom didn’t come in 1962. It didn’t come in 1972 or 1982 or 1992 or even 2002. Stardom was promised over and again. There were a slew of big-time producers who had me record songs they were certain were hits. There were a slew of big-time execs, rich and powerful label owners who said I was the Next Big Thing. They all either disappeared, lied or died. And I was left to scramble. The scramble is my story.”
The book and album arrive just when the celebration of Lavette’s extraordinary talents in full swing during her golden anniversary in the business. Her three previous ANTI- studio albums—I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, The Scene of the Crime and Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook—have brought her the popular and critical adulation she has long sought.
“In the late nineties, I was semi-famous, written about in out-of-the-way magazines in England where soul music specialists appreciated me,” says Bettye. “I love and appreciate those fans. But to be accepted by mainstream music lovers is another thrill altogether.”
Before that thrill were decades of dues-paying little gigs in little clubs, not to mention a slew of classic singles—“My Man--He’s A Loving Man,” “Let Me Down Easy,” “Your Turn to Cry,” “He Made A Woman Out of Me,” “Doin’ the Best I Can”—on over a dozen labels, big and small
A Woman Like Me doesn’t avoid the dark side of those years.
“Growing up as I did in Detroit,” says the singer, “I was a product of the pimp/producer culture. Some of those pimps were fascinating guys who became my good friends and helped me in a hundred ways. Some of them didn’t. I got so hung up on one of the ones who didn’t help that I actually gave him my money. I’ve made major mistakes and embarrassed myself more than I care to admit. But I vowed if I ever got a chance to write my book, I’d tell it all. Sure, I’ve done things some might see as shocking, but what can I say? It’s my life.”
That life—a series of wild and improbable adventures through Detroit, Harlem, Hollywood and New Orleans—includes a long stint co-starring with Cab Calloway in the national company of Bubbling Brown Sugar, a legendary performance of the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors and a duet with Jon Bon Jovi at President Obama’s pre-inauguration concert before a worldwide audience on HBO.
“Thankful N’ Thoughtful,” Bettye reflects, “tells you just where I am right now. I’m all caught up in gratitude for having won the endurance run. The title tune is Sly’s. I’ve always wanted to sing a Sly song, but I thought that he did them all perfectly. Then my husband Kevin brought me `Thankful N’ Thoughtful,’ one of Sly’s lesser known numbers. It felt like I could reinvent it and use the sentiment to express the overall theme of the record.
“For me it’s all about reinvention. If you read A Woman Like Me, you’ll see that I had to reinvent myself over and over again. And if you listen to this new record, you’ll hear me taking songs like `Dirty Old Town,’ an old Scottish ballad that Rod Stewart sang in the sixties, and talking about Northern, the high school I attended in Detroit, and the Graystone Ballroom, the place where I fell in love for the first time and decided to be an artist. When I rewrote the song I also sing of the Detroit riots in the sixties. `Dirty Old Town’ might have begun in Scotland, but it winds up in Dee-troit--the correct ebonic pronunciation--a place whose music shaped my life, and also a place I had to escape.”
Married since 2003, the Bettye LaVette/Kevin Kiley coupleship is a model of teamwork when it comes to song selection.
“Kevin is not only a good singer himself,” says Bettye, “but he’s a serious scholar and brilliant researcher when it comes to finding material from genres both in and outside of R&B. On this new record I sing songs by the Black Crowes, the Black Keys and Jon Bon Jovi. Someone said I’m fearless when it comes to approaching music outside my culture. I don’t see it that way. I see my culture as ever expanding. That’s been the pattern of my life.”
“None of this would have happened if my old manager Jim Lewis hadn’t taught me that songs are just songs. They’re simply words on paper. When Gene Autry sang a song, it was country and western. When I sing it, it’s rhythm and blues. And so if my career has taken the form of a rhythm-and-blues singer tackling unlikely and eclectic material, that’s due not only to Jim, but the creative input from Kevin and my other music guru, Andrew Kaulkin, president of ANTI-.”
It was Kaulkin who presented Bettye with “Yesterday is Here” by Tom Waits, another ANTI- artist.
Bettye hears the song as a flashback to New Orleans in the twenties. “When I sang it, I couldn’t keep my hips from relating to those drums. If I ever do the one-woman show I’ve been dreaming of, this song will have a special place. A Woman Like Me is about looking back, and `Yesterday Is Here’ has me doing just that.”
Producer Craig Street had the crazy idea that Bettye should sing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”
“Why not?” asks Bettye. “The older I get, the crazier I become—and I like that. I like embracing bizarre material and startling audiences. `Crazy’ is so loosely written that it was easy for me to give it an autobiographical feel.”
The record, like the book, looks ahead with positivity even as it reflects back on the struggle to keep that positivity alive.
“Everything is Broken,” a Bob Dylan song that Bettye renders with a sense of startling outrage, expresses a sentiment that could be applied to any number of moments in her life. And yet, despite that brokenness, she always found a way to forge ahead.
Andrew Kaulkin also brought Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” another miraculous transformation.
“For better or worse,” Bettye confesses, “my story is about wanting it all. I’ve never been satisfied with the mundane day-to-day. That’s the driving force behind A Woman Like Me—the search for satisfaction, both personal and professional. And that’s the emotional center of Neil Young’s song.”
If Thankful N’ Thoughtful is the record’s stated theme, the burning subtext is surely Kim McLean’s searing “The More I Search (The More I Die).”
“The single line I love the most on this album,” Bettye explains, “comes from `The More I Search.’ It says, ‘In my vain humiliation I have run through shame’s dark halls.’ Vain humiliation! That’s me. Even when I was down and out, even when I playing dives for fifty dollars and free drinks, I got myself dressed, put on my face and became Bettye LaVette. That was my vain humiliation. And in order to survive, yes, I walked down shame’s dark halls. I did some things—and I talk about them all in my book—that I don’t even want my grandchildren to know about. In fact, I’ve been thinking of asking them not to read the book until I’m dead and gone.
“But of course I can’t ask the same of the public. I want all my fans, the old ones and the new ones, to read this book. I want them to hear this record. I want them to know me—with all my strengths and flaws, with all my secrets revealed and ambitions unleashed. I want to be understood, accepted and loved for exactly who I am.”

This is the moment—the record, the book, the culmination of a lifetime of near-triumphs. This is Bettye LaVette’s triumphant year, her 50th in show business.
“Miss LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as this generation’s most vital soul singer,” proclaims the New York Times.
“With a voice as powerful as Etta James and a story as compelling as Tina Turner,” says one Rolling Stone writer, “LaVette is embracing the superstar status that has eluded her since the sixties. Justice has been served. Her time has finally come.”
Two major creative endeavors—a brilliantly reflective album, Thankful N’ Thoughtful, and a riveting autobiography, A Woman Like Me—will be released this fall. Together, they present Bettye at the top of her form, an artist with the unflinching courage to confront her past while reshaping her future.
At the heart of the Bettye LaVette story, whether sung as a song or narrated in a book, is the notion of creative survival. It is her voice that both announces and insures that survival; it is her voice that, no matter how dire the circumstances, lets you know that she will not be denied. It is her voice that compels you to listen to every word she says, sings or writes. That voice—rough, tender, sensuous and soaring—is an instrument of inspiration.
“Like all voices,” says Bettye, “mine has changed over the years. I’d like to think that the change has to do with wisdom. I’m far more selective about what songs I’ll sing. If I can’t re-sculpt them and, in many instances actually reinvent them to be part of my story, I can’t make them come to life.”
Bettye LaVette’s life story is nothing short of miraculous.
“I’ve been wanting to tell this story for years,” says the singer, “but I now I realize I had to live more of that life before it was time to write it down. It was all unplanned—as was everything in my career—but as I was writing A Woman Like Me, I was actually re-living many of those experiences in the songs of Thankful N’ Thoughtful. The two projects spoke to each other. As I wrote my life, I was singing my life. One helped me understand the other.”
LaVette’s explorations into, as one book critic put it, “the back room of her soul,” are adventures in the art of self-definition.
Who is she?
“A better question,” says Bettye, “is who was I? A sixteen-year-old girl from Detroit with a hit on Atlantic Records in 1962. I was a woman-child certain that the floodgates had opened and stardom was mine. I thought I was ahead of my Motown friends. I wasn’t on a local label. I had a national record company behind me, the people who had made stars of Ruth Brown and Ray Charles. But circumstances bit me in the ass. Stardom didn’t come in 1962. It didn’t come in 1972 or 1982 or 1992 or even 2002. Stardom was promised over and again. There were a slew of big-time producers who had me record songs they were certain were hits. There were a slew of big-time execs, rich and powerful label owners who said I was the Next Big Thing. They all either disappeared, lied or died. And I was left to scramble. The scramble is my story.”
The book and album arrive just when the celebration of Lavette’s extraordinary talents in full swing during her golden anniversary in the business. Her three previous ANTI- studio albums—I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, The Scene of the Crime and Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook—have brought her the popular and critical adulation she has long sought.
“In the late nineties, I was semi-famous, written about in out-of-the-way magazines in England where soul music specialists appreciated me,” says Bettye. “I love and appreciate those fans. But to be accepted by mainstream music lovers is another thrill altogether.”
Before that thrill were decades of dues-paying little gigs in little clubs, not to mention a slew of classic singles—“My Man--He’s A Loving Man,” “Let Me Down Easy,” “Your Turn to Cry,” “He Made A Woman Out of Me,” “Doin’ the Best I Can”—on over a dozen labels, big and small
A Woman Like Me doesn’t avoid the dark side of those years.
“Growing up as I did in Detroit,” says the singer, “I was a product of the pimp/producer culture. Some of those pimps were fascinating guys who became my good friends and helped me in a hundred ways. Some of them didn’t. I got so hung up on one of the ones who didn’t help that I actually gave him my money. I’ve made major mistakes and embarrassed myself more than I care to admit. But I vowed if I ever got a chance to write my book, I’d tell it all. Sure, I’ve done things some might see as shocking, but what can I say? It’s my life.”
That life—a series of wild and improbable adventures through Detroit, Harlem, Hollywood and New Orleans—includes a long stint co-starring with Cab Calloway in the national company of Bubbling Brown Sugar, a legendary performance of the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors and a duet with Jon Bon Jovi at President Obama’s pre-inauguration concert before a worldwide audience on HBO.
“Thankful N’ Thoughtful,” Bettye reflects, “tells you just where I am right now. I’m all caught up in gratitude for having won the endurance run. The title tune is Sly’s. I’ve always wanted to sing a Sly song, but I thought that he did them all perfectly. Then my husband Kevin brought me `Thankful N’ Thoughtful,’ one of Sly’s lesser known numbers. It felt like I could reinvent it and use the sentiment to express the overall theme of the record.
“For me it’s all about reinvention. If you read A Woman Like Me, you’ll see that I had to reinvent myself over and over again. And if you listen to this new record, you’ll hear me taking songs like `Dirty Old Town,’ an old Scottish ballad that Rod Stewart sang in the sixties, and talking about Northern, the high school I attended in Detroit, and the Graystone Ballroom, the place where I fell in love for the first time and decided to be an artist. When I rewrote the song I also sing of the Detroit riots in the sixties. `Dirty Old Town’ might have begun in Scotland, but it winds up in Dee-troit--the correct ebonic pronunciation--a place whose music shaped my life, and also a place I had to escape.”
Married since 2003, the Bettye LaVette/Kevin Kiley coupleship is a model of teamwork when it comes to song selection.
“Kevin is not only a good singer himself,” says Bettye, “but he’s a serious scholar and brilliant researcher when it comes to finding material from genres both in and outside of R&B. On this new record I sing songs by the Black Crowes, the Black Keys and Jon Bon Jovi. Someone said I’m fearless when it comes to approaching music outside my culture. I don’t see it that way. I see my culture as ever expanding. That’s been the pattern of my life.”
“None of this would have happened if my old manager Jim Lewis hadn’t taught me that songs are just songs. They’re simply words on paper. When Gene Autry sang a song, it was country and western. When I sing it, it’s rhythm and blues. And so if my career has taken the form of a rhythm-and-blues singer tackling unlikely and eclectic material, that’s due not only to Jim, but the creative input from Kevin and my other music guru, Andrew Kaulkin, president of ANTI-.”
It was Kaulkin who presented Bettye with “Yesterday is Here” by Tom Waits, another ANTI- artist.
Bettye hears the song as a flashback to New Orleans in the twenties. “When I sang it, I couldn’t keep my hips from relating to those drums. If I ever do the one-woman show I’ve been dreaming of, this song will have a special place. A Woman Like Me is about looking back, and `Yesterday Is Here’ has me doing just that.”
Producer Craig Street had the crazy idea that Bettye should sing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”
“Why not?” asks Bettye. “The older I get, the crazier I become—and I like that. I like embracing bizarre material and startling audiences. `Crazy’ is so loosely written that it was easy for me to give it an autobiographical feel.”
The record, like the book, looks ahead with positivity even as it reflects back on the struggle to keep that positivity alive.
“Everything is Broken,” a Bob Dylan song that Bettye renders with a sense of startling outrage, expresses a sentiment that could be applied to any number of moments in her life. And yet, despite that brokenness, she always found a way to forge ahead.
Andrew Kaulkin also brought Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” another miraculous transformation.
“For better or worse,” Bettye confesses, “my story is about wanting it all. I’ve never been satisfied with the mundane day-to-day. That’s the driving force behind A Woman Like Me—the search for satisfaction, both personal and professional. And that’s the emotional center of Neil Young’s song.”
If Thankful N’ Thoughtful is the record’s stated theme, the burning subtext is surely Kim McLean’s searing “The More I Search (The More I Die).”
“The single line I love the most on this album,” Bettye explains, “comes from `The More I Search.’ It says, ‘In my vain humiliation I have run through shame’s dark halls.’ Vain humiliation! That’s me. Even when I was down and out, even when I playing dives for fifty dollars and free drinks, I got myself dressed, put on my face and became Bettye LaVette. That was my vain humiliation. And in order to survive, yes, I walked down shame’s dark halls. I did some things—and I talk about them all in my book—that I don’t even want my grandchildren to know about. In fact, I’ve been thinking of asking them not to read the book until I’m dead and gone.
“But of course I can’t ask the same of the public. I want all my fans, the old ones and the new ones, to read this book. I want them to hear this record. I want them to know me—with all my strengths and flaws, with all my secrets revealed and ambitions unleashed. I want to be understood, accepted and loved for exactly who I am.”

This is the moment—the record, the book, the culmination of a lifetime of near-triumphs. This is Bettye LaVette’s triumphant year, her 50th in show business.
“Miss LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as this generation’s most vital soul singer,” proclaims the New York Times.
“With a voice as powerful as Etta James and a story as compelling as Tina Turner,” says one Rolling Stone writer, “LaVette is embracing the superstar status that has eluded her since the sixties. Justice has been served. Her time has finally come.”
Two major creative endeavors—a brilliantly reflective album, Thankful N’ Thoughtful, and a riveting autobiography, A Woman Like Me—will be released this fall. Together, they present Bettye at the top of her form, an artist with the unflinching courage to confront her past while reshaping her future.
At the heart of the Bettye LaVette story, whether sung as a song or narrated in a book, is the notion of creative survival. It is her voice that both announces and insures that survival; it is her voice that, no matter how dire the circumstances, lets you know that she will not be denied. It is her voice that compels you to listen to every word she says, sings or writes. That voice—rough, tender, sensuous and soaring—is an instrument of inspiration.
“Like all voices,” says Bettye, “mine has changed over the years. I’d like to think that the change has to do with wisdom. I’m far more selective about what songs I’ll sing. If I can’t re-sculpt them and, in many instances actually reinvent them to be part of my story, I can’t make them come to life.”
Bettye LaVette’s life story is nothing short of miraculous.
“I’ve been wanting to tell this story for years,” says the singer, “but I now I realize I had to live more of that life before it was time to write it down. It was all unplanned—as was everything in my career—but as I was writing A Woman Like Me, I was actually re-living many of those experiences in the songs of Thankful N’ Thoughtful. The two projects spoke to each other. As I wrote my life, I was singing my life. One helped me understand the other.”
LaVette’s explorations into, as one book critic put it, “the back room of her soul,” are adventures in the art of self-definition.
Who is she?
“A better question,” says Bettye, “is who was I? A sixteen-year-old girl from Detroit with a hit on Atlantic Records in 1962. I was a woman-child certain that the floodgates had opened and stardom was mine. I thought I was ahead of my Motown friends. I wasn’t on a local label. I had a national record company behind me, the people who had made stars of Ruth Brown and Ray Charles. But circumstances bit me in the ass. Stardom didn’t come in 1962. It didn’t come in 1972 or 1982 or 1992 or even 2002. Stardom was promised over and again. There were a slew of big-time producers who had me record songs they were certain were hits. There were a slew of big-time execs, rich and powerful label owners who said I was the Next Big Thing. They all either disappeared, lied or died. And I was left to scramble. The scramble is my story.”
The book and album arrive just when the celebration of Lavette’s extraordinary talents in full swing during her golden anniversary in the business. Her three previous ANTI- studio albums—I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, The Scene of the Crime and Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook—have brought her the popular and critical adulation she has long sought.
“In the late nineties, I was semi-famous, written about in out-of-the-way magazines in England where soul music specialists appreciated me,” says Bettye. “I love and appreciate those fans. But to be accepted by mainstream music lovers is another thrill altogether.”
Before that thrill were decades of dues-paying little gigs in little clubs, not to mention a slew of classic singles—“My Man--He’s A Loving Man,” “Let Me Down Easy,” “Your Turn to Cry,” “He Made A Woman Out of Me,” “Doin’ the Best I Can”—on over a dozen labels, big and small
A Woman Like Me doesn’t avoid the dark side of those years.
“Growing up as I did in Detroit,” says the singer, “I was a product of the pimp/producer culture. Some of those pimps were fascinating guys who became my good friends and helped me in a hundred ways. Some of them didn’t. I got so hung up on one of the ones who didn’t help that I actually gave him my money. I’ve made major mistakes and embarrassed myself more than I care to admit. But I vowed if I ever got a chance to write my book, I’d tell it all. Sure, I’ve done things some might see as shocking, but what can I say? It’s my life.”
That life—a series of wild and improbable adventures through Detroit, Harlem, Hollywood and New Orleans—includes a long stint co-starring with Cab Calloway in the national company of Bubbling Brown Sugar, a legendary performance of the Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors and a duet with Jon Bon Jovi at President Obama’s pre-inauguration concert before a worldwide audience on HBO.
“Thankful N’ Thoughtful,” Bettye reflects, “tells you just where I am right now. I’m all caught up in gratitude for having won the endurance run. The title tune is Sly’s. I’ve always wanted to sing a Sly song, but I thought that he did them all perfectly. Then my husband Kevin brought me `Thankful N’ Thoughtful,’ one of Sly’s lesser known numbers. It felt like I could reinvent it and use the sentiment to express the overall theme of the record.
“For me it’s all about reinvention. If you read A Woman Like Me, you’ll see that I had to reinvent myself over and over again. And if you listen to this new record, you’ll hear me taking songs like `Dirty Old Town,’ an old Scottish ballad that Rod Stewart sang in the sixties, and talking about Northern, the high school I attended in Detroit, and the Graystone Ballroom, the place where I fell in love for the first time and decided to be an artist. When I rewrote the song I also sing of the Detroit riots in the sixties. `Dirty Old Town’ might have begun in Scotland, but it winds up in Dee-troit--the correct ebonic pronunciation--a place whose music shaped my life, and also a place I had to escape.”
Married since 2003, the Bettye LaVette/Kevin Kiley coupleship is a model of teamwork when it comes to song selection.
“Kevin is not only a good singer himself,” says Bettye, “but he’s a serious scholar and brilliant researcher when it comes to finding material from genres both in and outside of R&B. On this new record I sing songs by the Black Crowes, the Black Keys and Jon Bon Jovi. Someone said I’m fearless when it comes to approaching music outside my culture. I don’t see it that way. I see my culture as ever expanding. That’s been the pattern of my life.”
“None of this would have happened if my old manager Jim Lewis hadn’t taught me that songs are just songs. They’re simply words on paper. When Gene Autry sang a song, it was country and western. When I sing it, it’s rhythm and blues. And so if my career has taken the form of a rhythm-and-blues singer tackling unlikely and eclectic material, that’s due not only to Jim, but the creative input from Kevin and my other music guru, Andrew Kaulkin, president of ANTI-.”
It was Kaulkin who presented Bettye with “Yesterday is Here” by Tom Waits, another ANTI- artist.
Bettye hears the song as a flashback to New Orleans in the twenties. “When I sang it, I couldn’t keep my hips from relating to those drums. If I ever do the one-woman show I’ve been dreaming of, this song will have a special place. A Woman Like Me is about looking back, and `Yesterday Is Here’ has me doing just that.”
Producer Craig Street had the crazy idea that Bettye should sing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”
“Why not?” asks Bettye. “The older I get, the crazier I become—and I like that. I like embracing bizarre material and startling audiences. `Crazy’ is so loosely written that it was easy for me to give it an autobiographical feel.”
The record, like the book, looks ahead with positivity even as it reflects back on the struggle to keep that positivity alive.
“Everything is Broken,” a Bob Dylan song that Bettye renders with a sense of startling outrage, expresses a sentiment that could be applied to any number of moments in her life. And yet, despite that brokenness, she always found a way to forge ahead.
Andrew Kaulkin also brought Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” another miraculous transformation.
“For better or worse,” Bettye confesses, “my story is about wanting it all. I’ve never been satisfied with the mundane day-to-day. That’s the driving force behind A Woman Like Me—the search for satisfaction, both personal and professional. And that’s the emotional center of Neil Young’s song.”
If Thankful N’ Thoughtful is the record’s stated theme, the burning subtext is surely Kim McLean’s searing “The More I Search (The More I Die).”
“The single line I love the most on this album,” Bettye explains, “comes from `The More I Search.’ It says, ‘In my vain humiliation I have run through shame’s dark halls.’ Vain humiliation! That’s me. Even when I was down and out, even when I playing dives for fifty dollars and free drinks, I got myself dressed, put on my face and became Bettye LaVette. That was my vain humiliation. And in order to survive, yes, I walked down shame’s dark halls. I did some things—and I talk about them all in my book—that I don’t even want my grandchildren to know about. In fact, I’ve been thinking of asking them not to read the book until I’m dead and gone.
“But of course I can’t ask the same of the public. I want all my fans, the old ones and the new ones, to read this book. I want them to hear this record. I want them to know me—with all my strengths and flaws, with all my secrets revealed and ambitions unleashed. I want to be understood, accepted and loved for exactly who I am.”