The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Bettye LaVette brings her soulful take on the blues to StageOne
FAIRFIELD — It doesn’t get much more soulful than Bettye LaVette — and with her current album, “Things Have Changed,” a collection of reinterpreted Bob Dylan songs, one could argue that you haven’t really heard Dylan until you’ve heard his songs done by LaVette.
But let’s face it: this is a woman who could sing the phone book and have it come out as a soulful blues song.
But don’t take my word for it.
Ask the Blues Foundation, which in 2016 awarded her the Blues Music Award for Best Soul Blues Female Artist. LaVette also is a member of The Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame and received the Unsung Heroine Award from the National R&B Music Society.
Or just go see her on Friday at Fairfield Theatre Company’s StageOne. Showtime is 7:45 p.m. Tickets are $48, available in advance at fairfieldtheatre.org or 203259-1036.
(Friday will be a tough choice for some fans: soulful blues rocker Dana Fuchs will be playing at more or less the same time right next door at FTC’s The Warehouse. Showtime for that one is 8 p.m. and tickets are $35, also available in advance at fairfieldtheatre.org or 203259-1036. Both venues are at 70 Sanford St.)
LaVette’s latest album, on Verve/UMG Records, features appearances by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones and New Orleans’ dynamic Trombone Shorty, along with former Dylan and Levon Helm guitarist Larry Campbell, and is LaVette’s first major label release in 30 years.
But it’s by no means the first ripple she has sent out in the music world.
LaVette, a Muskegon, Michigan, native, grew up in Detroit and now lives in West Orange, New Jersey. She released her first album at age 16 and at one time, for a brief period, was signed to Atlantic Records.
But she never achieved the fame of an Aretha Franklin — to whom she sometimes is compared — Gladys Knight or Tina Turner.
That doesn’t mean she didn’t deserve it.
As you might expect from someone born in Muskegon on the east shore of Lake Michigan, squarely between the spheres of Chicago and Detroit, LaVette’s music falls deep in the groove between blues and soul, and she treads the line between the two as well as anyone.
During a half-centuryplus career that has brought her everywhere from the Chicago Blues Festival to the “Tonight Show” to former President Barack Obama’s inauguration, LaVette has covered everything from The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” to Joe South’s “Games People Play,” Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” Erma Franklin’s “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart,” Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” and Etta James’ “Damn Your Eyes.”
She released an entire, moving album of soul covers of British rock songs.
LaVette sang a duet of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” with Jon Bon Jovi at Obama’s inauguration.
She won a Blues Music Award in 2008 for “Best Contemporary Female Blues Singer.”
Stevie Wonder wrote “Hey Love” just for LaVette.
In 2009, she stole the show at Lincoln Center — where The Who’s Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey were among the honorees — with her cover of The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me.”
That song later was included on her 2010 album, “The British Rock Songbook,” which also included LaVette’s interpretations of songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Animals and others.
But it really doesn’t matter whose song it was before LaVette got her hands — and voice — on it.
Once she’s done her work, pretty much everything she sings comes out sounding like a Bettye LaVette creation.