An American treasure, Bettye LaVette’s a blues-soul singer with a truly remarkable background and heritage. “I’ll be 75 in January,” she told me, and she has weathered countless twists and turns in her own musical journey since first recording as a sixteen-year-old with Atlantic Records, in Detroit. As we chatted, UK pop giants The Beatles surprisingly somehow creep, albeit forcefully, into the conversation about her current place and her new album, Blackbirds, on Verve, though the new album is far from anything dated by 1960s’ musical shackles.

Blackbirds, I suggested, includes an unexpected and surprising take as a title track with a Paul McCartney song: “Well, why not? It’s a song about a bird, hearing a bird singing. A blackbird!,” she laughed.

“I was invited to sing at Ringo Starr’s birthday recently. He’s now 80. I told him I had thought that I was old!” I asked how he took that. “He was great. He just laughed. I sang at his birthday about four years ago. We get on okay.”

How long was the latest project in the thinking and making? I asked.  Bettye laughed. “The new album was always there really. I always have projects on the go, songs I’ve already recorded, maybe just waiting ’til I’m ready to put it all together. I never do more than two cuts of any song. I’ve been doing this a long time and I know what works for me. And I have Steve Jordan again as producer. He knows what he’s doing and he knows what I like.” Jordan, now an industry veteran and always in-demand producer, also produced LaVette’s last, widely acclaimed offering, Things Have Changed, in 2018, an album that gained Best Americana Album award nominations and introduced her to many more listeners globally.

We discussed the horror of racism in the world generally and the USA in particular, an inescapable topic since the new album was driven by the subject, and full of tracks that shout about the appalling events surrounding the issue. I mentioned talking with Nashville-based Will Kimbrough. Kimbrough’s song, “Alabama,” on his latest album, I Like It Down Here, is based on the public lynching of a young black man in the southern state in the early 80s, a shocking incident that brings into question of just how recent such behaviour is in the US. Lavette agreed, but countered by asking me when the last similar event happened in Mississippi. She told me: “It was only a few years ago in Mississippi.”

As we ran through the tracks, ranging from Nina Simone’s “I Hold No Grudge,” Nancy Wilson’s “Save Your Love For Me,” to Dinah Washington’s “Drinking Again,” Bettye again confirmed her despair that now, in 2020, the striking relevance and terrifyingly horrific imagery of one track in particular remains as salient and significant as it did when first recorded by Billie Holiday, almost a century ago, in 1939: “’Strange Fruit’ is an incredible song,” she said with an understandably heartfelt sigh: ”It’s just incredible and unbelievable that here we are again facing these issues and this behaviour. Absolutely incredible. I’ve been around a long time now and I never thought I’d be witnessing this kind of thing again in my lifetime.”

We discussed the awards circus. With five Grammy nominations now behind her, this is a topic she sure understands and knows all too well. LaVette never works with the intention of winning an award. “Well, I had an unusual career in lots of ways. I had a sort of intense time when I was on the awards thing, compressed into a few years when I was younger and I look back at it. But it’s always good to be part of it for my profile. It raises my musical profile, especially internationally,” she explained with a contented shrug.

LaVette acknowledges her luck in still having a strong, powerful, pure voice and vocal delivery. “I’m lucky to have kept my voice pretty good,” she said, with the unsaid but clear implication that there are many others out there who have failed to protect what is probably their prime industry asset. “I’ve kept myself in good shape,” she laughed. When I agreed, saying she’s kept her sass, too, LaVette again laughed, but couldn’t quite hold back from quietly agreeing.

—Iain Patience