Music Monday: Bettye Lavette

Sadly for me, I only discovered Betty Lavette when she released the "I've Got My Own Hell to Raise" album. Now I know that she was a Detroit soul R&B star in the early 60's. I have the sorta excuse that I was born in 1954 , but that doesn't really explain how I found so many other musicians who made music before my own time.

This interview with ReelBlack is very good. I love both the history, the reality that a great singer was neglected for so long, and the equal reality that her survival depended upon her wise response to being told that she needed to work at becoming a great singer. Hey, how many singers would spend decades working on Lush Life? (IMHO Ricky Lee Jones was not yet worthy.)



Here she is then



And now



Did The Who know that they'd be sitting with Barbara Streisand at the Lincoln Center event honoring their career? What an amazing thing to see Bettye Lavette, Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry and Barbara Streisand all present in the same musical moment.

Anyway, Bettye Lavette is wonderful. Buy anything and everything she sings.

LOST Tuesday: Sound and Fury

It's another LOST Tuesday without any good TV but thankfully, there are a still good LOST bloggers posting great closing thoughts. In contrast to the rather elegant view that LOST was reminiscent of Visions of Johanna, Fishbiscuitland is screaming out for those of us who cared about the characters, the mysteries. Jack? Not so much.

In the end, was LOST Cheesy? Lame? Cliched? Cheap? Vapid? Sound and fury signifying nothing?

Hang in there, Fishbiscuit.

LOST Tuesday: Visions of Johanna

I can't stop LOST Tuesday-ing, so I'll continue with my own occasional reflections and share what I think are some of the best other ones out there.

Ack Attack Rachel has a great analysis of The End that uses Dylan's Visions of Johanna as the organizing theme. Read her deep Dylan pensive piece here. And then read her funniest ever recap of The End right here.

My own theory is that what happened, happened. No, they weren't dead all along. No, the island wasn't purgatory. No, the last season was not Jack's dying dream. No, the whole show wasn't about being saved by Jesus or any other Christian Shepherd. I see the sideways world a little like Ack does, but I would call it the collective unconscious, a place made real simply by the relationships between our characters, their ego selves, and all of the mythology of humankind that makes it possible for us to construct individual selves, at least during the brief period of our individual lives, and then to let all of that go in death.

And just to wrap this one up, here's Visions of Johanna on Pandora.