Bettye LaVette

The follow-up to LaVette's potent 2005 LP I've Got My Own Hell to Raise stays true to its title, as The Scene of the Crime is the sound of a survivor's sure-footed stand. Here LaVette returns to Muscle Shoals' FAME Studios, where she made her 1972 Southern soul album, Child of the Seventies, before Atlantic buried the recording deep in its vaults for decades. On this trip through town she sounds positively defiant.

Scene simultaneously reaches forward and backward in time. Collaborations with Patterson Hood and other Drive-By Truckers continue the "pair-a-veteran-soul-singer-with-a-younger-producer" trend, and contributions from original Muscle Shoals session workhorses David Hood (Patterson's father) and Spooner Oldham bring the generations of musicians full circle.

But LaVette doesn't allow guests or circumstances to overshadow her formidable vocal performances. She exorcises her demons — namely, the false idea that a 40-year career of fits and starts makes her damaged goods — against a riveting backdrop of sinewy guitars, pedal steel, and Wurlitzer enveloped in haunted reverb. Like a skilled character actor, she sells devastation and tough-skinned nerve like few others can. She tightens the melodies into clenched bursts, spearing them through with raw, hoarse emotion. She makes her big point during the strutting autobiographical anthem "Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette)," though, where she states, "Some folks didn't see my worth, didn't know where I fit in/Forty years I kept on singin' before the money started rolling in." Whatever the actual size of said cash waves, she finally has an audience with a healthy respect for her primal force. Although it's a crime that LaVette's album was shelved years ago, it's clear she's no intimidated victim.