Bettye LaVette
"Blackbirds"
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Bettye LaVette got her start as a young soul singer who scored an R&B hit with her debut single, "My Man _ He's a Lovin' Man," as a 16-year-old in 1962.
But the late career renaissance she's enjoyed since the mid-'00s has mostly found her interpreting rock songwriters, from Fiona Apple on 2005's "I've Got My Own Hell to Raise" to The Who's "Love Reign O'er Me" at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors to her 2018 set of Bob Dylan covers, "Things Have Changed."
"Blackbirds," which was produced by Steve Jordan, the master drummer and bandleader who's done sparkling work with Keith Richards and Robert Cray, again finds LaVette reshaping songs, finding new shades of meaning and depth of feeling in compositions both treasured and obscure.
This time, though, the material _ with the exception of the Beatles' song that gives the album its name _ comes from another source: Black women. The selections are all songs that are either written by or closely associated with female African American vocalists, most of whom had an impact on LaVette as she was coming of age.
They include Nancy Wilson's "Save Your Love for Me," Nina Simone's "I Hold No Grudge," Della Reese's "Blues for the Weepers," and Billie Holiday's sorrowful "Strange Fruit," which she gives a characteristically imaginative reading without sacrificing any of the anti-lynching lament's searing power.
Johnny Mercer and Doris Tauber's torch song "Drinking Again" is included as a tribute to the dynamic song stylist Dinah Washington, who recorded it 1962. But LaVette's intimate, conversational take actually more closely resembles that of Frank Sinatra, who cut the song in 1967.
Like Sinatra, LaVette specializes in cracking open songs she didn't write herself and turning them into wrenching personal statements. On "Blackbirds," she does that by inhabiting laments and songs of resilience sung by her forebears, and making them her own. _ Dan DeLuca
