Bettye LaVette performs at the Newport Folk Festival in 2006. Since then, her 47-year career as a singer has taken off. She performs tonight at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River.

The providence Journal / Frieda Squires

The first time you hear Bettye LaVette’s voice, you have to wonder — where has this woman been all these years?

Well, she’s been around — and around and around. The soul singer cut her first side in 1962 at the age of 16, and hit the R&B Top 10 with her first Atlantic single “My Man — He’s a Loving Man.” But that was it.

She kept performing and making records, including 1980’s excellent Tell Me a Lie, on Motown. And they kept going nowhere. It was one of the great mysteries of pop music — to those who had heard of her at all, anyway.

What happened?

“It’s 47 years,” LaVette says. “It’s not one thing; it’s 47 years of things. You’re not doing a book, are you? It’s been all kinds of things.”

Her record companies would go out of business; her A&R mentors would get fired; her manager would get shot.

Shot?

“Killed!” LaVette says.

Still, she never got the chance at the big time she deserved.

But the last few years have been good to LaVette, as she signed on to Anti Records, resulting in 2005’s I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise and 2007’s The Scene of the Crime, both of which take LaVette’s classic soul voice and put it in a context that’s modern yet vintage-sounding. Scene of the Crime is a particularly thrilling teaming of LaVette and The Drive-By Truckers; together they put a roadhouse R&B feel on chestnuts such as Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces,” Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” and the haunting “Choices.”

Getting LaVette together with the Truckers was Anti label head Andrew Kaulkin’s idea. “They’re all his ideas,” LaVette says; “I just interpret them.” Lavette had heard of the group, but didn’t know much about them. Still, she says, it went well.

“I was probably more of a problem to them than they were to me, because they’re all around my grandchildren’s age. It was more ‘Just listen to what I tell you.’ So I’m sure I got on their nerves tremendously. But I got good work out of it, and I think they were very pleased with what we got out of it.”

They’re the songs of a strong, experienced woman looking back with satisfaction on a hard-won life, and if that sounds a little like LaVette herself, well, yeah.

Signing with Anti, LaVette says, has been the catalyst. She’s been traveling the globe, appearing at festivals and on television, getting the kind of exposure she never had in her youth.

“This past year’s been the best year of my life,” LaVette says. “Started with a Grammy nomination and ended up in the White House.”

She’s referring to her performance at the Kennedy Center Honors program last month, where she sang a version of “Love, Reign O’er Me” in the tribute to Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey that brought the house down and the Who icons to tears.

“Pete told me that he cried,” LaVette says, “and Roger said he was really amazed. They both went on and on.”

“My favorite moment,” Townshend later wrote on TheWho.com, “was when Bettye LaVette sang a very fine version of ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ at the Gala and Barbra Streisand turned to ask me if I really wrote it.”

LaVette does that to songs. Witness the covers on The Scene of the Crime and her versions of Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream” and Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.” When she takes a song, she makes it hers.

“Well, who else’s can I make them?,” she asks. “That always strikes me funny, because that’s the only way I can sing them. I don’t practice how I’m going to sing them. When I hear them and like them, I know how I’m going to sing them. And I’m such an arrogant singer, I have to go back and see how the person who made it is singing them. Because all I hear is the song. …

“It’s the melody that makes me listen to it, and if the lyrics are good — well, the lyrics have to be good; I’m an old woman standing there hollering! I can’t just stand there hollering; I’ve got to have something to holler about!

“The songs are very personal to me, and that’s why I have to pick them. It’s like lovers; no one can pick those for me.”

During her decades in the pop-music wilderness, where LaVette was a cult figure to klatches of Northern Soul fans, LaVette took what gigs she could get, whether it was concerts or musical theater (the touring company of Bubbling Brown Sugar in the late ’70s). All of it, she says, helped her gain experience and skills.

“I was fortunate that everything I collected over the 47 years, I still have.

“When Broadway called, I couldn’t say ‘I can’t learn to tap dance.’ I had to learn what the gig called for. Because no one was calling for me, I had to adjust myself to the gig.”

And she learned to do other things in life.

“I learned to cook; I learned to garden perfectly, and I learned to be a really good grandmother. And then they said ‘OK, you can be Bettye LaVette now.’ And I was like, ‘But my hands are dirty and my grandchildren are waiting for me to come over!’ But this is all that I love to do. I never wanted to be anything else.”

Even though the temptation was strong to get a day job, “I didn’t even lie to people and tell them that I was going to come to their job,” she says. “It would annoy me and humiliate me so much. I’d just find people I knew who had jobs and borrow money from them. It’s a different kind of humiliation, but it’s with people who love me.

“And I had to stay in shape for it; that was probably the most annoying thing. … I thought, ‘I don’t know whether they’ll ever call, but I have to be ready if they do.’ ”

Now that they have, she’s enjoying it, but with wisdom provided by the years.

“I know it’ll never be the way it was again, to where I didn’t know when there would ever be a gig,” she says, but adds “I hope this trend will continue. It is this business, so you never know what’s going to happen.”

Asked whether people are coming back around to her after all these years, she takes exception to the phrasing.

“Coming back around? They’re coming around for the first time. I’ve never made this much money; I’ve never been this many places. I think they’re just getting to me.”

Bettye LaVette sings at the Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River, tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Admission is $25 in advance, $28 the day of the show. Call (508) 324-1926.

Barnacled, featuring Alec K. Redfearn, Frank Difficult and more, celebrate the release of Charles on the big-deal avant-gardist label ESP at AS220, 115 Empire St., Saturday night at 9. Admission is $6; call (401) 831-9237.

Saxophonist Greg Abate is one of the best-known and best-traveled Rhode Island musicians, an old-time guy who makes a living one gig at a time hopping the globe playing bop, which isn’t going to get anyone rich but will get you to Chan’s, 267 Main St., Woonsocket, Saturday night at 8. Admission is $15; call (401) 765-1900.

Patrick Sky was a longtime Rhode Islander, but not a native, who now lives in North Carolina. I screwed that up in last week’s bit about Rhode Island musicians’ plans for 2009.

rmassimo@projo.com