The Scene of the Crime

Soul music veteran Bettye LaVette sees things come full circle with her 2007 studio release *The Scene of the Crime*. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama (“the scene of the crime”), 35 years after her 1972 album, *Child of the Seventies*, was shelved by Atlantic Records, it fires back on all cylinders. “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye Lavette),” the one original composition co-written with producer and Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood, captures LaVette’s deep pain and bitterness over this career-inhibiting move. Elsewhere, she employs the same tough, schooled and scarred voice for a well-chosen collection of tunes, from the gentle dissipation of Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces,” the wry truths of the George Jones hit “Choices” and the out-of-left-field cover of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” that immediately becomes an R&B standard in LaVette’s experienced hands. Drive-By Truckers and Muscle Shoals veterans David Hood and Spooner Oldham provide solid, restrained backing that make this a modern, yet essentially undated and unpretentious, soul music recording.

After her 2005 comeback I've Got My Own Hell to Raise, Bettye LaVette records her proper return, backed by the Drive-By Truckers and fueled by decades of frustration.

On the surface, it may seem that pairing soul survivor Bettye LaVette with Southern rockers the Drive-By Truckers is a match made in hell, and no one could be blamed for that assumption.

It would be easy for someone like Bettye LaVette to allow her backstory to do most of the heavy lifting in the current phase of her career.

Bettye LaVette memorably sang about Muscle Shoals on I've Got My Own Hell to Raise (2005).