WAIT NO MORE WIND BACK WEDNESDAY, HERE FLOATS BETTYE LAVETTE

You’ve heard that if you wait long by the river, the bodies of your enemies will float by? That’s probably true – I’m still waiting for a couple, but I’m patient – and it’s also the name of a superb album by The Drones. But there’s another truism as a music fan, wait long enough by the door of your favourite record store and maybe, just maybe, all the good stuff will float in.

Some proof of that happened recently for me with the acquisition, via one of my most pernicious enablers/dealers/destroyers of bank balances, Redeye Records, of Bettye LaVette’s Let Me Down Easy: Bettye Lavette In Memphis.

The compilation of her 1960s recordings for a subsidiary of Sun Records is an excellent blend of power and grace. It’s also a reminder that timing/luck can mean as much as talent and songs when it comes to success: there’s no reason but bad luck that this soul and R&B singer didn’t crack through back in the day.

But wait long enough …

Which is where Wind Back Wednesday arrives today, finding Ms LaVette in 2005 when a much-delayed rediscovery of her voice thankfully had happened while she was still alive and singing - and shows no sign of slowing really, 20 years on - and an album of new material was coming out. She was busy, she was rueful, she was in charge, and it was definitely not a comeback.

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BETTYE LAVETTE’S VOICE IS HUSKY, with that post-gig roughness which suggests, typically, she wasn't pulling back tonight on stage.

"I'm holding on honey. I'm holding on to all this activity," she laughs throatily down the phone line. "It's a very busy time, busier than I've ever been in my entire 44 years [as a performer]."

Ah yes, the busy-ness. It comes with having a new album, which is only the third album you've recorded in 44 years but the first to come with press attention, fellow artists such as Elvis Costello singing your praises and demands to speak with you even in places where soul and R&B has never really taken hold. It comes too with demands for you to play even more shows, and you're someone for whom several hundred gigs a year is a quiet year.

"There are some downsides but it's because I'm doing what I should have been doing 30 years ago," says LaVette firmly but with a chuckle in her voice as she adds. "There's nothing we can do to negate the fact that I am 60 years old and it's kind of like being pregnant at 60: that would be exciting but my God it would be so taxing."

Yes Bettye Lavette is 60. A grandmother even. But she's made the best album of her career and one of the best this year and she is rather proud of it thank you very much. Just don't call it a comeback. She hates that word.

"I want people to know that [it's not a comeback] because as I complain if I had been living in a car all this time and suddenly they found me and saved my life, maybe, but my life has always been intact, thank goodness. I'd been working all the time standing on 5 inch heels, in little nasty dinky places maybe doing three shows a night.

"Of course I'm extremely grateful: I thought I was going to die in obscurity so I literally feel as if I had been toiling in a field somewhere and have been emancipated."

Free at last, God Almighty, free at last. Yet, just how frustrating the past 44 years have been can only be guessed at, even if you know the Bettye Lavette story

When 16-year-old Detroit school girl Bettye Jo Haskins released My Man, He's a Lovin' Man, her first single in1962 on the prestigious Atlantic label (home at various times to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and half the great soul singers of the day) not only did they change her name but they seemingly changed her fortune. The song was an R&B hit and she began releasing a steady stream of singles, the kind which became prized possessions for collectors over the next 30 years.

The problem was, one of the reasons the singles were so prized was because despite their quality they were never big hits or compiled on an album. Indeed even when Lavette recorded her first album in 1972 it wasn't released; only emerging in 1992 when a friend pressed a small run.

Along the way she fell out of with Atlantic, (who by then had long turned their attentions to Aretha Franklin), saw one manager shot and another disappear, and despite the occasional low level chart hit, never really made it out of obscurity corner into the kind of attention her obvious talent deserved.

But everything has changed in the past year. Firstly, A Woman Like Me, her second album, won a couple of awards. Then, crucially, the head of the San Francisco underground label Anti, which made its name with punk records but had just resurrected the career of another '60s soul giant, Solomon Burke, saw her perform. He suggested she record an album for him covering songs by contemporary female songwriters such as Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Dolly Parton and Sinead O'Connor.

LaVette wasn't sold on the idea at first, openly wondering what these younger women could have to say that meant anything to her.

"Mostly [new song writers] have nothing to tell me," LaVette says. "And young people tend to be very wordy and I wanted to synopsize a lot of things, like the Sinead O'Connor tune: I knew what she wanted to say and I felt the same way and I was able to say it four verses instead of six or seven."

She was sent 100 songs and the ten she recorded were the only ten she wanted for the album which became I've got My Own Hell To Raise.

"My daughter is 45 years old and I have a 20 year old grandson who I listen to nonsense from everyday but every so often my grandson says something to me which touches my heart and makes me cry, so beautiful and insightful and that basically is what these songs have done."

What LaVette brought to them though was pretty special: a voice seasoned and deepened by years working the clubs and dives, singing pop standards, jazz tunes and turning them into soul and R&B. There's grit there but suppleness and subtlety too. And plenty of power, more than you expect from her slight and diminutive frame, the antithesis of the soul queen.

"It took me a very long time to be a good singer. I always had a good voice but like when people ask me about Joss Stone I say I think she's got a great voice and if she works at this as long as I do think she could become a great singer. This is the first time that I've been incomplete possession of the artist Bettye LaVette. I know exactly what I can do with this voice now."

She sighs: "It cost me an awful lot to learn that."