You can’t really call Bettye LaVette’s 21st-century career revival a comeback any more – not when her profile is bigger now than it’s been since her 60s debut. In the past few months alone, the rhythm and blues singer’s name has reached beyond music nerd circles thanks to her show-stopping performances at the Kennedy Center Honors and We Are One, the Obama inaugural celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, where she sang Sam Cooke’s classic A Change Is Gonna Come with Jon Bon Jovi.

“That’s the first time that song has ever been completely timely for me,” says LaVette from her New Jersey home. “The general feeling among blacks at the time that song originally came out was that change was not coming, so the song only became poignant for me quite recently.

“It was a wonderful experience on many levels. It brought me new fans and the opportunity to be seen all over the world at once, which had happened to everyone else on that stage except me. The last time a lot of black people heard from me, Obama hadn’t even been born yet.”

LaVette’s most recent album, The Scene Of The Crime (Anti-), may have surprised fans because of its Southern rock and country sounds, contributed in part by the Drive-By Truckers, who acted as her studio backing band. But according to LaVette, country was as much a part of her upbringing as soul and blues.

“I’ve always liked country. In fact, my mother was a country music groupie. As a result, I heard a lot of it growing up.

“Growing up in segregation, and seeing as my family sold drinks, most black people who came through Muskegon, Michigan, in 1947 had to come to our house if they wanted a chicken sandwich and a drink. Because of that, I was exposed to all kinds of black and Southern music in general as a child.”

This exposure served her well during the decades she toiled in obscurity after Atlantic shelved her debut album, Child Of The Seventies, in 1972. She did Broadway, tried her hand at disco and found work on the European festival circuit. “If after 47 years all I could do was one style of music, that would get on my nerves.”

LaVette was just 16 when she recorded her first hit, My Man – He’s A Lovin’ Man. Child stars often blame their aborted childhoods and lost adolescence for later meltdowns, so you have to wonder what jumping into showbiz at such an early age was like for her.

“I don’t know what else I could’ve been. I’m not scholastic and I never wanted to be a student. I always wanted to dress up and hang out with adults. I was born to be in dark places, drinking and smoking and doing all kinds of seedy stuff. This is the perfect business for me.”

The Scene Of The Crime features one song co-written by LaVette called Before The Money Came (The Battle Of Bettye LaVette), which she says is the only track she’s penned that’s ever been properly recorded. But don’t expect her to embrace songwriting wholeheartedly any time soon.

“I’m not a writer, and it doesn’t interest me. When I think about things, I rarely think, ‘Wow, that would make a good song.’ To be a real songwriter, you need to think that thought four times a day, but it only happens to me once every 10 years.”

music@nowtoronto.com