Bettye Lavette - A Woman Like Me

Size: 137.2 MB
Time: 58:52
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2002
Styles: Electric Blues, Blues Soul
Art: Full

01. Serves Him Right (4:18)
02. The Forecast (5:02)
03. Thru The Winter (5:48)
04. Right Next Door (4:31)
05. When The Blues Catch Up To You (4:44)
06. Thinkin' About You (4:58)
07. A Woman Like Me (5:55)
08. It Ain't Worth It After A While (5:20)
09. When A Woman's Had Enough (4:16)
10. Salt On My Wounds (4:39)
11. Close As I'll Get To Heaven (4:54)
12. Hey, Hey, Baby (Bettye's Blues) (4:21)

"I can feel the pain, Lord, it's raining in my heart," Bettye LaVette howls on "The Forecast," and it sounds like it. On this stunning comeback -- her first American release in over 20 years -- the feisty soul singer rips through an hour of music with the pent-up hunger of a caged tiger at feeding time. Helped immeasurably by producer/songwriter Dennis Walker, best known for his breakout work with Robert Cray, LaVette moans, screams, shouts, pleads, and growls her way through a dozen tracks that'll leave even the most jaded R&B fan begging for more. One of the casualties of music biz politics, LaVette has a style that has only sharpened with age. In her mid-fifties at the time of this recording, the singer has a husky voice that tears at the edges, adding deeper emotion. Although the production leans toward the slick side, it leaves room for the singer to dominate each track. Walker, who wrote or co-wrote nine of these tunes, provides heart-tugging yet defiant material perfect for LaVette's take-no-prisoners approach. The singer plays the part of the scorned, aggressive woman, left behind but strong enough to know she's better off without that no-good scoundrel. Song tiles such as "Salt in My Wounds," "Serves Him Right," and "It Ain't Worth It After a While" tell the story without having to hear a lyric. LaVette squeezes every ounce of emotion from this material, lashing into it with a barely contained explosive delight. Like a stage actress, she builds up the tension gradually until igniting in a shower of yelps and repeated phrases similar to Otis Redding at his most impassioned. This is a powerful album -- moving, intense, and honest -- from an artist desperately making up for lost time. It's a success for everyone involved, and deserves to put Bettye LaVette back on American stages where she belongs. ~Hal Horowitz

A Woman Like Me MP3
A Woman Like Me FLAC

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Bettye LaVette - Blackbirds

Year: 2020
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 40:17
Size: 93,1 MB
Styles: Jazz/Blues
Scans: Front, back

1. I Hold No Grudge (5:00)
2. One More Song (5:22)
3. Blues For The Weepers (3:46)
4. Book Of Lies (3:40)
5. Romance In The Dark (4:18)
6. Drinking Again (5:36)
7. Strange Fruit (4:14)
8. Save Your Love For Me (4:50)
9. Blackbird (3:28)

The soul/jazz/blues singer is pushing six decades as a professional musician (she released her first recording at the age of 16) yet shows no sign of slowing down. And even though she doesn’t compose her tunes, Bettye LaVette’s iconic, lived in voice, dynamic arrangements and forceful/taut interpretations bring unique perspectives to everything she touches. LaVette doesn’t just croon songs, she gets inside them, turns them inside out and reveals layers of meaning often even their writers didn’t express as effectively. Her 2018 set of Bob Dylan tunes, some quite obscure, showed how she transforms even unlikely material for an R&B vocalist into something that sounds like, well, a Bettye LaVette track.

For this follow-up, the singer tackles selections (mostly) made popular from other iconic black women artists. The Beatles (almost) title track is the exception, but it fits the disc’s theme of the African American experience in love, loss and civil rights through the decades. Songs associated with Nina Simone (“I Hold No Grudge”), Dinah Washington (“Drinking Again”) and Nancy Wilson (“Save Your Love for Me”) capture the dusky closing time bar/club vibe through stripped down instrumentation from an all-star quartet (including Leon Pendarvis on keys and guitarist Smokey Hormel) enhanced by drummer Steve Jordan’s sympathetic production.

Blackbirds mc
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Bettye Lavette - Things Have Changed

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 58:57
Size: 135.0 MB
Styles: Blues, Soul
Year: 2018
Art: Front

[6:56] 1. Things Have Changed
[5:29] 2. It Ain’t Me Babe
[4:02] 3. Political World
[5:05] 4. Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight
[5:05] 5. Seeing The Real You At Last
[3:46] 6. Mama, You Been On My Mind
[5:38] 7. Ain’t Talkin’
[5:07] 8. The Times They Are A-Changin'
[4:41] 9. What Was It You Wanted
[5:22] 10. Emotionally Yours
[3:36] 11. Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
[4:04] 12. Going, Going, Gone

On the title track of this remarkable collection of Bob Dylan covers, Betty LaVette wraps her voice – full of grit, brass and soul when she started recording at 16 in 1962; worn and sharpened by experience now at 72 – around a lyric about sitting on the lap of strange man with pale skin and an assassin's eye. The way she tells it, that man could be the song's author or a villain in an epic of intrigue, or maybe there's no difference between the two. She makes the song so alive with consequence and possibility, it's able to transform into whatever she or the listener needs it to be in the moment: a spy movie, a romance novel, a Biblical parable of reckoning, a bittersweet memory of a time when caring mattered or a way of drinking away the pain of that memory.

The tricks and miracles of Things Have Changed are manifold. Half of its 12 tracks restore life to songs that were dead-on-arrival on Dylan albums from 1979 to 1989; the rest reshapes more essential parts of the legend. The grooves constructed by drummer and producer Steve Jordan have both the booming precision of hip-hop loops and the flexible responsiveness of classic R&B. This is tradition-based music that extends the heritage it draws from. "It Ain't Me Babe" sways over a slow soul pulse as LaVette's phrasing pulls the song in different directions, opening up unexpected pockets of defiance or mourning. LaVette and Jordan reframe "The Times They Are A-Changin'," as swamp-rock, its talk of the rising waters of change suddenly connecting to all of Dylan's apocalyptic tales and its new reverbed guitar hook suddenly definitive.

LaVette has played around with the rock repertoire since 2005's I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, covering everyone from the Stones to Fiona Apple. Yet this album is more hers – more personal and reflective of her wicked ways, sly humor and battle-tested wisdom – than any she's made. Consider Dylan a jumping off point for LaVette – a way of drawing power and focusing attention until she can take the time she needs to describe the world the way it feels to her: a tangle of longing, lust, struggle and hard-won satisfaction. ~Joe Levy

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Various - Strange Angels: In Flight With Elmore James

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 49:59
Size: 114.4 MB
Styles: Blues, Soul, Country, Pop, Americana
Year: 2018
Art: Front

[2:15] 1. Elayna Boynton - Can't Stop Loving You
[3:17] 2. Bettye Lavette - Person To Person
[2:34] 3. Rodney Crowell - Shake Your Money Maker
[3:18] 4. Tom Jones - Done Somebody Wrong
[5:56] 5. Warren Haynes - Mean Mistreatin' Mama
[2:57] 6. Deborah Bonham - Dust My Broom
[9:10] 7. Jamey Johnson - It Hurts Me Too
[4:00] 8. Shelby Lynne - Strange Angels
[3:42] 9. Keb' Mo' - Look On Yonder Wall
[4:08] 10. Mollie Marriott - My Bleeding Heart
[2:21] 11. Chuck E. Weiss - Hawaiian Boogie
[3:53] 12. Addi McDaniel - Dark And Dreary
[2:20] 13. Elmore's Latest Broomdusters - Bobby's Rock

Passionate music followers have been known to trade thoughts on times, places, and musical line-ups they can only fantasize being there to catch. An easy nominee might for one of those would be Sylvio’s bar on Chicago’s West Lake Street in the 1950s and early ‘60s, where Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf traded off as headliners, occasionally shared bills. In those cases, the management definitely wanted an act strong enough to sandwich between those fierce competitors and their enormously skilled and exciting bands to keep both the musical heat and customers in place, and for that, the choice would often be house regulars Elmore James and His Broomdusters. Elmore’s slashing slide guitar and explosive vocal attack were famous in themselves, and had produced the hit “Dust My Broom,” that gave his band its name.

That celebrated song, and its lasting riff, had been taught to Elmore by legend-to-be Robert Johnson, but Johnson’s own record was long out of circulation when James’ electrified version became a hit in 1952, and remained so until 1970; the hundreds of blues revival and rock versions heard since were picked up directly from Elmore, though he didn’t live to know it, having died from a heart attack at age 45, in 1963

The style of guitar and vocal attack stuck because Elmore’s turns on older blues, and songs he came up with himself, were flat out electrifying in all senses of the term. As rock ‘n roll gave way to harder rock, his vocal and instrumental example became all the more a model, for all the more performers. He’d played with a full band (horns sometimes, electric always) as early as 1939, when that was an utterly novel way to present intense, personal Delta blues numbers; his songs and arrangements were built to work in hot band situations. When you hear country traditionalist Jamey Johnson’s take on the now standard blues “It Hurts Me Too,” you can be sure it’s Elmore James’ sturdy and adaptable song being saluted—though history shows that Elmore had adapted it from Tampa Red’s “When Things Go Wrong With You.’ Elmore’s music sticks, instructs, and sets a pace.

That’s evident throughout this salute album— which puts such often-revisited James numbers as “Shake Your Moneymaker,” “Look on Yonder Wall,” and “Person to Person” alongside songs known mainly by James aficionados, gets them into the hands of masterful interpreters from out of the blues, soul, country, pop and Americana arenas, as far-ranging as Tom Jones, Rodney Crowell, Keb Mo, Deborah Bonham of the rocking Bonham family, and sisters Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer. The set reveals something fresh in the process: Elmore James contributed more than riffs and intensity to American music, he left a body of memorable, adaptable songs that can be renewed again and again in surprising ways. They’re that sturdy—and no less electrifying for it. ~Barry Mazor

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Bettye Lavette - Thankful N' Thoughtful (Deluxe Edition)

Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 62:42
Size: 143.5 MB
Styles: Soul/R&B/Blues
Year: 2012
Art: Front

[3:41] 1. Everything Is Broken
[3:31] 2. I'm Not The One
[3:55] 3. Dirty Old Town
[4:20] 4. The More I Search (The More I Die)
[3:15] 5. I'm Tired
[5:44] 6. Crazy
[3:36] 7. Yesterday Is Here
[4:20] 8. Thankful N' Thoughtful
[3:15] 9. Fair Enough
[4:01] 10. Time Will Do The Talking
[3:15] 11. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
[6:57] 12. Dirty Old Town (Slow Version)
[4:34] 13. Old
[3:53] 14. Welcome To The Good Times
[4:16] 15. Whole Lotta Lonely

Bettye LaVette gets classified as an R&B singer, which she is, of course, but her newest album, the Craig Street-produced Thankful N' Thoughtful, finds her taking her blues, gospel, and soul-influenced singing style into deep, swampy, and edgy American roots territory, and she makes it all work with a sting and bite to her phrasing that ranks her as one of the best living soul singers. She gives Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" a little jump of joy, moving the song away from being plaintive and lonely to something closer to anxious homesickness. Tom Waits' "Yesterday Is Here," complete with brass and reeds, loses some of its clang and becomes a poignant blues. The most stunning track here is LaVette's reinvention of the old folk song "Dirty Old Town," best known in the version by the Pogues. She fills it with disgust and ominous menace -- there's also a slower version of "Dirty Old Town" that lets a measure of sadness creep back in at the close of the album. Thankful N' Thoughtful is a solid outing from an outstanding singer who knows how to growl, croon, grumble, praise, and jump for joy with her vocal phrasing -- whatever makes the song live and breathe. She is still a marvel. ~Steve Leggett

Thankful N' Thoughtful (Deluxe Edition)

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Bettye LaVette - Worthy

Released: 2015
Size: 101.5 MB
Time: 44:05
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Styles: Blues Soul
Art: Front

1. Unbelievable [3:15]
2. When I Was A Young Girl [3:40]
3. Bless Us All [2:49]
4. Stop [4:24]
5. Undamned [3:33]
6. Complicated [3:43]
7. Where A Life Goes [5:05]
8. Just Between You Me And The Wall You're A Fool [6:39]
9. Wait [3:40]
10. Step Away [3:04]
11. Worthy [4:08]

Bettye LaVette doesn't write her own songs, but she doesn't have to -- by the time she's finished singing a tune, LaVette has turned it into something entirely her own, an emotional statement that's original and complete. Since LaVette reminded American listeners that she was still working at the top of her game with the 2003 live set A Woman Like Me, she's been releasing a steady stream of new albums confirming her status as one of the strongest and most individual interpretive vocalists in the 21st century. LaVette's first studio album after A Woman Like Me was the outstanding I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, produced by Joe Henry, and for 2014's Worthy, LaVette has teamed up again with Henry and several of the same musicians who played on those sessions. Henry is a producer whose approach is less about studio technique and more about setting a mood and letting artists go where they will, and LaVette is the sort of artist who responds best to this treatment; on Worthy, LaVette sings with strength and passion, but she understands dynamics, knowing when to go full-out and when to rein herself in, and her tough but thoughtful approach to the material is powerfully effective and full of keen emotional intelligence and her soulful, sweet and sour voice. Worthy finds LaVette covering songs by the Beatles ("Wait"), the Rolling Stones ("Complicated"), Bob Dylan ("Unbelievable"), and Beth Nielsen Chapman (the title cut), but if LaVette doesn't necessarily make you forget the originals, each time she takes them to a place that's clearly of her own making. LaVette discovers something fresh and deeply personal in every number here, and the backing band on these sessions (including Doyle Bramhall II on guitar, Chris Bruce on bass, and Patrick Warren on keyboards) works with her beautifully, with a give and take that's a master class in how to accompany a vocalist. Worthy is another impressive release from an outstanding singer, and if it follows the pattern of some of her recent albums, nothing here sounds rote; this is the sound of an artist doing what she does best, and she is far more than worthy of this great music.

Worthy

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Various - Sun Record Company: Soul Queens

Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 36:15
Size: 83.0 MB
Styles: Memphis soul, Contemporary blues vocals
Year: 2013
Art: Front

[2:33] 1. Gloria Taylor - Grounded Part I
[3:22] 2. Bettye Lavette - Games People Play
[2:43] 3. Margaret Lewis - How Would You Know
[3:29] 4. Peggy Scott - Every Little Bit Hurts
[2:18] 5. Betty Harris - All I Want Is You
[2:12] 6. Evie Sands - I Can't Let Go
[2:55] 7. Teresa Smith - He's A Cooker
[2:53] 8. Carolyn Porter - Put Your Mind Where Your Heart Is
[2:33] 9. Barbara Hall - From The Lips
[2:51] 10. Betty Harris - There's A Break In The Road
[3:15] 11. Carol Channing - He's A Cooker
[2:15] 12. Bettye Lavette - Piece Of My Heart (Take Another Little)
[2:49] 13. Marilyn Haywood - Think About It

Sun Record Company: Soul Queens

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Various - Sun Record Company: The Rhythm & The Blues

Bitrate: 320K/s
Time: 55:44
Size: 127.6 MB
Styles: R&B, Memphis blues
Year: 2012
Art: Front

[2:39] 1. Alvin Robinson - Let The Good Times Roll
[2:30] 2. Carl Mann - Walking The Dog
[2:44] 3. Wilbert Harrison - Let's Stick Together
[2:15] 4. Bettye Lavette - Piece Of My Heart (Take Another Little)
[3:55] 5. Johnny Adams - Reconsider Me
[2:34] 6. Frank Ballard - Boney Maroney
[2:22] 7. Little Junior Parker - Mystery Train
[3:55] 8. Sleepy Labeef - Polk Salad Annie
[2:23] 9. Jerry Lee Lewis - C. C. Rider
[3:03] 10. Rosco Gordon - Booted
[2:23] 11. Carl Mann - Ain't Got No Home
[3:00] 12. Georgie Boy - If I Can Dream
[2:47] 13. Rufus Thomas - Tiger Man
[2:35] 14. Big John Hamilton - Big Bad John (They Call Me)
[2:01] 15. Ray Smith - There's A Break In The Road
[2:52] 16. Betty Harris - There's A Break In The Road
[2:20] 17. Miller Sisters - Ten Cat's Down
[3:08] 18. Earl Hooker - The Hucklebuck
[3:01] 19. Gabie Reed - I'm Your Man
[3:07] 20. Boyd Gilmore - Believe I'll Settle Down

Sun Records burst onto the post-World War II American scene suddenly, a force that few would forget. At the helm was Sam Phillips, an eccentric radio engineer willing to put black and white sharecroppers, truck-drivers, dishwashers, and factory workers in front of a microphone. Always insistent on keeping recording sessions simple and down-to-earth, the producer elicited performances that reflected a degree of sincerity missing from much of the Tin Pan Alley fare of the period. Phillips’s ability to parlay regional, racial, and class marginalization into a viable commercial product that spoke to teenage angst and alienation put Sun Records on the map. And in its improbable rise to prominence, the unseemly record company situated at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis provided a special moment that launched the careers of several performers who attained legendary status. Given the nature of a popular-music universe littered by falling stars instantaneously extinguished, this fact alone grants the company historical relevance.

Instantly recognizable by a bright yellow label with a crowing rooster perched in the foreground, Sun Records signified a wake-up call to the placid Eisenhower era. The music and vitality that resounded from the momentous meeting of phonograph needle and waxed groove in the thirty-by-eighteen-foot studio formerly used as a radiator shop introduced the world to rockabilly, an almost indescribable sound that applied the kinetic energy of southern working-class gospel to an unprecedented fusion of white hillbilly and black rhythm and blues. The company and the music it produced represented necessary links in the evolution of rock-n-roll. Its influence as a record company, however, lasted less than a decade. By the end of the 1950s, its sun already had begun to set.

Yet in these few years, Sun Records mattered a great deal. In many ways, its story resembled that of many independent recording companies that emerged in the wake of World War II. Responding to the postwar market demands of a rapidly growing urban African American population (and taking advantage of technological innovations that made recording cheaper), entrepreneurs formed small record companies that recorded modern-sounding black artists. Local radio, accorded greater autonomy as network programming declined due to an emphasis on television, devised formats that assisted in exposing rhythm and blues to the public. Independent record proprietors, who generally were white, capitalized on such developments. Hoping to achieve financial success by filling a void that the industry’s major recording companies (such as RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca) had not yet acknowledged, independent upstarts like Atlantic, Chess, Specialty, King, and Modern-RPM literally created an R&B field.

Sun Record Company: The Rhythm & The Blues

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