Photo by Carol Friedman

Bettye LaVette

Talent has never been the most important ingredient for success in the music business. Sure, the cream sometimes rises, but bad luck and poor timing have left many great singers on the fringes.

Detroit soul/R&B singer Bettye LaVette, who comes to Jefferson Center on Friday, could have been the poster girl for rough luck and timing. She had her first R&B hit, "My Man - He's A Loving Man," at age 16. But it wasn't long before her first manager, Robert West, was shot and wounded in a still-mysterious dispute in which no one was charged.

After the shooting, West left the music business. It would be 40 years before LaVette again had a manager. And her career began to stagnate, despite such gems as the single "Let Me Down Easy."

Meanwhile, Motor City contemporaries Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin reached the top. Such early career tourmates as Ben E. King, Otis Redding and James Brown also made it.

"I look around the people across the alley from me" in Detroit, LaVette said in a phone interview last week. "Smokey Robinson is becoming a millionaire. Aretha has left the church. She never seemed a threat, because she was in the church. Suddenly she leaves the church after awhile and becomes Aretha Franklin.

"I knew all these people â? so to see all of these people suddenly become millionaires and then move out of the place, and nobody was left there but me."

But she had one key ingredient - persistence. LaVette never stopped performing, never stopped recording, even after heartbreaking departures from Atlantic Records and Motown Records. She stayed on the road or took on projects like a role in the Toni award-winning Broadway musical "Bubbling Brown Sugar," with Cab Calloway.

But folks with good ears were always hip to LaVette's vocal style - by turns raspy, explosive, smooth and sexy - and her persistence crossed paths with good luck and timing.

In 2000, a French collector discovered her never-released "Child of the Seventies" tapes in the Atlantic vaults, then put it on the market. By 2003, she had recorded and released "A Woman Like Me," which won her the 2004 W.C. Handy Award for Blues Comeback Album of the Year.

Since then, LaVette has enjoyed more success and roots music awards with the 2005 disc "I've Got My Own Hell To Raise," "The Scene of The Crime," a Grammy-nominated 2007 collaboration with the Drive-by Truckers; and her latest, "Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook," featuring her takes on Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," Led Zeppelin's "All My Love" and more.

These days, the 66-year-old, still-beautiful LaVette, who lives in New Jersey, is quick to laugh about the tough times. She is excited as she prepares an autobiography and a new album for later this year.

"I owed everybody I ever recorded for, because for the time they liked me, they really liked me, so they would spend a lot of money [on production]," LaVette said. "But they would get over it, because I wasn't selling no records. So as a result of that, they didn't owe me a thing, moneywise. And now, fortunately, I don't owe them anything."