Bettye LaVette (Photo by Marina Chavez)
“I call this my fifth career,” soul singer Bettye LaVette told the audience at The Hamilton Live recently, “because it’s stopped and started so much.”
Born in Muskegon, Michigan in 1946, she began her recording when she was just a teenager, in 1962. Over the years, she’s endured the failures of record labels and other career mishaps, only to achieve real breakthrough success around the turn of the century. The start of that “fifth stage,” she noted, came with a song written producer Dennis Walker, best known for his work with blues artist Robert Cray: “A Woman Like Me.”
