Still raising hell after all these years

You might have heard how the punk-rooted L.A. record company Anti- brought a neglected soul-music legend out of obscurity by recording an album pairing the singer with some contemporary songwriters and musicians.

You might be thinking Solomon Burke, but now there’s a second correct answer: Bettye LaVette, a Detroit singer who’s hung on by a thread for most of a 43-year career, scoring sporadic R&B; hits in the ‘60s and ‘70s and attaining stature as one of the music’s overlooked and underappreciated greats.

Like Burke’s 2002 album “Don’t Give Up on Me,” LaVette’s new Anti- album, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise,” matches an experienced singer with songs by some younger writers -- in her case Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Sinead O’Connor and more. Both albums were produced by Los Angeles musician Joe Henry.

“I feel like it’s done in the same spirit,” says Anti- President Andy Kaulkin, 41, comparing the Burke and LaVette projects. “I have a kind of an agenda I guess. I feel like pop culture is so youth-obsessed, and there’s a lot of older artists out there that have really significant things to say. There’s maturity and wisdom in their music and it just doesn’t get put out there....

“I feel like older artists can make really great artistic, meaningful records,” adds Kaulkin, whose label also works with such veteran artists as Tom Waits and Marianne Faithfull and issued new Merle Haggard albums in 2000 and 2001.

Kaulkin had heard about LaVette from musician Ry Cooder, and he quickly signed her after catching a show at a Bay Area nightclub. At the Echo on Thursday, LaVette played an hourlong set to celebrate the album’s release (it’s due in stores Sept. 27), and she made it easy to see why Kaulkin would pull out a contract.

Though nearing 60 and slight of frame, LaVette unleashed a voice of volcanic power, focused and guided by a theatrical sensibility. She also created moments of painful intimacy, relying on the supple phrasing she developed from studying such masters as Frank Sinatra.

LaVette also flashed a frisky and irreverent personality as she and her four-man band played some tunes from her earlier days, but the emphasis was on material from the new album, which is built on the concept of interpreting songs by female writers.

With her gritty, raspy timbre, LaVette transformed such selections as Lucinda Williams’ “Joy,” Joan Armatrading’s “Down to Zero” and Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” into searing, Southern-soul statements of pain and determination.

She ended with the album’s opening song, an unaccompanied version of O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got” in which her combination of shredded, ragged texture and unyielding force captured the lyric’s mix of trial and affirmation. It was a gripping moment, and the audience honored it with rapt attention.

That’s quite a diverse pool of songwriters, but that kind of range is nothing new for LaVette, who over the years has recorded material by the Beatles, Neil Young and an array of country composers.

“They at one time were all just words on a piece of paper,” the singer said during an interview at her downtown hotel Thursday afternoon. “And if someone country and western sung it, they made it country and western. I made it rhythm & blues. That’s what singers are supposed to do.... You know, 40 or 50 years ago, a songwriter would write a song and everybody and their son would record it. It was everybody’s song. ‘Who do you like it by?’ And I really like the notion of that.”

She was born Betty Haskin in Muskegon, Mich., and grew up in Detroit, where her parents worked in factories and sold corn liquor at home. Their customers included gospel singers such as Sam Cooke and the Swan Silvertones, and they gave LaVette her first exposure to music.

Drawn to the pop world’s glamour and fame as a teenager, she found it easy to get started.

“In Detroit in the ‘60s you almost lived next door to a record company wherever you lived. That’s what you did in the ‘60s -- record.... I was just there, as we all were. We wanted to get out of where we were, we wanted to have some money.”

“My Man -- He’s a Lovin’ Man,” recorded when she was 16, was a Top 10 R&B; hit in 1962, but after that it was hit and miss for LaVette, who was raw as an artist and inexperienced in business. She attributes her relative obscurity to being “underpromoted,” and to what she calls “buzzard luck.”

Her first manager was shot, she says, and another one disappeared. But the biggest blow came in the early ‘70s, when she recorded an album at the famed Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama, only to have Atlantic Records decide not to release it.

“I got under the table with a half-gallon of wine and stayed under there about five days,” LaVette said. “That kind of thing happened a lot. But somebody would always call and say, ‘I want to record you,’ or somebody would call and say, ‘I’ve been looking for you for five years.’

“I’ve always worked. If it was for $50 or $500 or $5,000, I’ve always worked.... I have never done anything else but this. And I have always been a firm believer in the way that the great masters, the painters were -- that the townsfolk should take care of me, and I always let them. Honey, everyone has paid a bill for me. And I’ve never said. ‘Oh no no no, I’d rather go work at Burger King.’ ”