Have it Your Way

I listened to her sing it at the Kennedy Center Honors in January, 2009 and was right there with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry as they watched her make "Love Reign O'er Me" her own.  I was sure everyone in that theater was thinking what I, and most assuredly Townshend and Daltry, were thinking - that music is the most incredible art form in the world.  Don't agree?  Do you remember when Dudley Moore ordered lunch for the dying John Gielgud in the movie Arthur?  Well, think of other classic art forms such as sculpture and painting as the Trout Almondine from Lutece.  It comes only one way, the way the chef at Lutece tells you it must be.  Sculpture and painting insist that the viewer experience exactly what the artist created, no changes, no substitutions!  Of course, if you've ever seen Michelangelo's Pieta, you gladly accept this truth and applaud the chef.
But music is different. I am a person who can't play the dinner bell; to me music is just a scrum of ridiculous lines and dots on a piece of paper.  Listen to it, always; understand it, never.  In the hands of a musical artist however,  the confusing jumble is transformed into, well, music.  But what separates music from other classical art is that in the hands of a different artist, that jumble can become a very different sounding Pieta.
There is no better example of the individuality of the musical art form than Bettye Lavette's performance of "Love Reign O'er Me".  Townshend wrote a song with a distinct purpose and sound that became a rock classic.  Lavette's brushes curve in a different way and the resulting canvas is something quite different but no less compelling.
So there they were, Townshend, Daltry and Barbra Streisand who also received a Kennedy Honor that night, entranced at this unknown singer putting a lifetime of soul and grit on display, proud of the brotherhood that musicians and actors feel for one another no matter their status or fame.
This week, I read Bettye Lavette's recollections of this event in the November 15th edition of The New Yorker and suddenly this story of art, individuality and creative interpretation and appreciation was turned upside down.  It turns out that when Lavette was approached by the show's producer to perform this song, Lavette wept.  Not because she had put her heart and soul into her music for over 50 years and was now finally getting her big break, but because she didn't like or understand the song at all.  "The biggest opportunity I've ever been offered in my life, and this is the song I've been given," she said.  "I felt completely defeated."  It seems there is a lot more to Bettye Lavette than anyone in that theater realized.  It's a fascinating story that illuminates both the struggles of life as a musical artist and the good fortune that their art is born of a jumble of lines and dots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJi6maTueSc
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/15/101115fa_fact_wilkinson