The Derek Trucks Band
January 26th, 2008
Child prodigy Derek Trucks is a fiery guitar slinger whose slow-burn slide style owes a lot to the legends of the blues. Like a younger version of Stevie Ray Vaughan (sans the been-at-the-bottle-too-long growl), Trucks' jams duplicate the dips and twists of Buddy Guy and Al King. A kid no more, Trucks now fronts his own band, a formidable blues unit deeply rooted in Southern Rock soil. - Chad Driscoll
Bettye LaVette
The often unrecognized, bottomless soul of Bettye LaVette's voice, and the lack of acknowledgment she receives as one of the genre's pioneers, ranks her among the most underrated artists ever. Brought up in Detroit, LaVette's talent wasn't cultivated from the city's deep gospel influence like many of her Motown peers, but rather from the blues. At 16, she recorded her first single, "My Man, He's a Lovin' Man" with Detroit man-about-town Johnnie Mae Matthews, who sold the rights to Atlantic Records and made the song a hit on the soul charts. Shortly afterwards, she recorded her biggest success, "Let Me Down Easy," which turned out to be a bit of a career prophecy. The song became her standard, but didn't break the Billboard's Top-100. Instead, the singer's music lived among the shadows of giants. She toured with iconic performers like Ben E. King, Otis Redding and James Brown, but failed to receive the accolades these artists did. After several disappointments with the industry, she left for a leading role in the Broadway show Bubbling Brown Sugar opposite Cab Calloway, and stayed in the Broadway circuit for several years before returning to the record business during the disco-era. That produced another small hit "Doin' the Best I Can." Going largely unnoticed through the '80s and '90s, the songstress toured Europe's soul circuit for the next decade, but her fortunes didn't change until 2000, when music connoisseur Gilles Petard discovered a shelved LaVette recording from 1972 and released it, reawakening an interest in the artist's canon. Approaching her sixties, with a voice bigger than ever and a massive will to succeed, the singer gained another flicker of the spotlight in 2005, when she released the Andy Kaulkin-produced I've Got My Own Hell To Raise. - Jeremy Stanifer
Bettye LaVette also delivered an astonishing performance at New York's Columbia University in 1999, where she and fellow soulster, Maxine Brown garnered standing ovations, thus adding fans in the college set.
LaVette's musical director was the late, great Rudy Robinson, a man who has been involved in the careers and recordings of many great artists including David Ruffin, Martha Reeves and countless others.
Bettye's "comeback" was no fluke, she had been preparing for this for years and when the opportunity presented itself again, she was ready. No artist has worked harder than she, whether appearing before 300 people at the Knitting Factory or thousands at blues and jazz festivals, she turned it out.
Now, Americans have gotten "wind" of LaVette…the Europeans were far ahead of us in their COMPLETE devotion to her talents. Like Timi Yuro, Bettye was a STAR overseas, but America continued to make stars out of European mports when the real talent was already here.
LaVette has appeared on both Letterman and Conan O'Brien, can Leno, Oprah, The View, etc. be far behind? We, her devoted fans, would love seeing her UPSET the Grammys (famous for featuring "questionable talent" each year, who happened to sell a lot of records), so she could remind our nation what REAL TALENT is all about.