know. So I dug a little further and called
a few people directly. Everybody said that Bettye had seemingly
vanished and no one had heard from or spoken to her for at
least twenty years. I was told that she was working as a
waitress in a restaurant somewhere in Georgia, that she’d
become a Jehovah’s Witness and not only had she turned
her back on the amorality of the music business, but she’d
also changed her name to make sure that her
past stayed exactly where it was. I even spent several weeks
randomly ringing any B.Swann or B(etty Jean) Champion – her
real name – I could find in the American telephone
directory. It got me nowhere. The only thing that I knew
for sure was that Bettye had disappeared, which was going
to make her story hard to tell. The most recent interview
I could find was from over thirty years ago.
Then one evening I spoke to Candi Staton who had been close to Bettye back in
the early seventies. She told me that last she’d heard Bettye and her husband,
George Barton, had moved to Vegas. I’d not heard good things about George
and so assumed they had divorced, but Candi said she heard that George had died.
There were two Betty Bartons in the Vegas White Pages, but no Bettye. I rang
the first number, by now feeling like some kind of stalker, and a woman picked
up. “I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” I said, “but
are you Bettye Swann?” When she said yes I nearly put the phone straight
back down in shock, overcome by a vague sense of guilt that maybe the reason
nobody had been able to find Bettye was that she didn’t want to be found.
She couldn’t have been nicer though, but after a few minutes’ chat
and passing on some of her old friends’ numbers she said she had to be
getting on, that she’d call me back in a day or two so I could talk to
her properly. The call never came.
So the mystery of Bettye Swann remains and all we’re left with is the music.
The one thing I did learn about her life now is that she works with children
with educational problems, and seems to be very happy doing so. She sounded very
contented, and obviously enjoyed working at something which helped other people.
In a way then she’s doing exactly the same thing as she was nearly forty
years ago, because for me the special quality of Bettye Swann’s voice is
its inherent optimism. Even when she’s singing the saddest of songs, there’s
a streak of hope that runs through the notes.
Betty Jean Champion was born in Shreveport on October 24 1944,
and spent her first nineteen years growing up in rural Louisiana.
Then she moved to California
to pursue her dream of making it as both a singer and writer. On her twentieth
birthday she signed a deal with Money Records. She recorded some beautiful singles
for Money but her breakthrough came with ‘Make Me Yours’ in 1967,
still her biggest selling record. Shortly after ‘Make Me Yours’ hit,
Bettye married her manager George Barton and they left Los Angeles for Georgia,
where George had set up as a promoter on the black circuit down south.
Within a year, Bettye was back in LA. After the Money deal expired she signed
with Capitol Records, who teamed her with Wayne Shuler. Wayne is the son of the
legendary Louisianian producer Eddie Shuler, and had grown up surrounded by music.
He’d found his way to Capitol Records and worked variously as promo man,
A&R man, and even as executive producer on Joe South’s records. Working
with Bettye was the first time Capitol let Wayne produce a record on his own.
Fortunately he was a natural.
“ They gave Bettye to me because I was the only person who really knew
R&B”, he told me. “I knew some of her Money records and liked
her voice but wasn’t that familiar with her. I had always wanted to cut
an R&B version of Hank Cochran’s ‘Don’t Touch Me’,
and Bettye was tailor-made for it. She wasn’t up for it so I had to do
a sales job, but once it hit of course it became her idea.”
Though Bettye told me that she was happy to sing country songs, she did say “I
wanted to do any song I was given my way. When I say ‘my way’, I
mean the way I was feeling it. If someone played a song for me, no matter what
the style was, I’d want to sing it the way I felt it.” For sure,
it was her proposal to try an upbeat version of Merle Haggard’s classic
country ballad ‘Today I Started Loving You Again’ – and Wayne
was reluctant. The whole time I spoke with him the most excited he got was when
he told me that they also cut a slower version as a duet with Buck Owens. As
Wayne tells it – “It’s just a killer, man. Nothing but a rhythm
track; Bettye and Buck Owens. It’s a killer. Bettye wanted to do it up-tempo
the way it is on the album, but I wanted to do it slower and got Buck in. But
when Ken Nelson [head of the country division at Capitol] found I’d cut
Bettye with Buck he practically had a haemorrhage. Buck was all ready to put
Bettye on ‘Hee Haw’ [his massively popular nationally-syndicated
country-comedy show], and DJs were ringing begging me to let them have the record,
but I had to tell them that Ken Nelson would sack me straightaway if I let that
happen.” Though this was a year after the assassination of Martin Luther
King, and two years after Charley Pride had become the first black singer to
appear on the Grand Ole Opry, the powers that be at Capitol obviously feared
that to be seen and heard duetting on a love song with a black woman could seriously
damage Buck’s career. Ironically, later that same year Capitol’s
biggest country star, Merle Haggard, followed up ‘Okie From Muskogee’ – his
seemingly conservative anthem – with a song about interracial love called ‘Irma
Jackson’. (And three years later Bettye cut yet another version of ‘Today…’ at
Fame with Rick Hall that was much closer to Wayne’s original conception.)
Wayne told me that he always recorded Bettye with a black audience in mind, and
despite the high proportion of country songs these are definitely soul records.
Somehow these two displaced Louisianians combined to make music that sounds like
nothing else from the time. Bettye never sings with the desolation of O.V.Wright,
the hurt of Percy Sledge, or the sheer pain of the final Linda Jones records.
Yes, there’s a southern feel to these Swann-Shuler recordings, but they
also have a light, almost poppy quality to them. Sometimes they sound like the
missing link between Muscle Shoals and Motown.
Wayne’s selection of songs for Bettye’s Capitol sessions never puts
a foot wrong. Whether a fifties’ pop standard like ‘Little Things
Mean A Lot’, a current rock hit like ‘Traces’ by Classics IV,
or recent soul smashes like ‘Tell It Like It Is’ or ‘Cover
Me’ – Wayne consistently produced records with Bettye that have so
much personality and life you completely forget that you’re listening to
someone else’s songs. Only last week I watched a room packed with three
or four hundred young Londoners dance euphorically to Bettye’s version
of Tony Joe White’s ‘Willie and Laura Mae Jones’. I doubt whether
more than a handful of the people in that room had any idea what they were dancing
to, but thirty five years after it was recorded it’s as infectious and
joyous as the day it was recorded. Dusty Springfield cut the same song in 1969
as well, and as great as Dusty’s version is, it’s languid where Bettye’s
is defiantly upbeat.
Perhaps the most obvious example of Bettye’s ability to transform a song
and make it her own is her version of ‘Stand By Your Man’, which
sheds any trace of submissiveness, coming across instead as a plea for tolerance
and patience with the man you love, and a declaration that his faults and weaknesses
don’t mean that you have to be weak too. No other version of this song
manages to make it a song about self-empowerment in the way that Bettye’s
does.
During the weeks I spent trying to track Bettye down the one thing that became
increasingly clear is that everyone who’d known her only had good things
to say about her. The more people I spoke to the more obvious it became that
the vibrancy and optimism that you hear in her voice were simply an expression
of her personality. When we told Candi Staton that we were reissuing Bettye’s
Capitol sides she immediately asked if we knew where she was as they’d
been good friends in the seventies – they met at one of Bettye’s
shows – but had lost touch when Bettye left the music business. “She
was a beautiful lady. She was really, really friendly. Soft spoken, very generous.
Just a down home girl, someone you’d be glad to know. We used to talk to
each about our kids, husbands, travelling, and stuff like that.”
Sometimes Candi would travel with Bettye as a friend even if she wasn’t
part of the show. Life on the road in the south for black singers could still
be hard. One time whilst driving through Mississippi they stopped for gas, and
whilst Bettye’s husband filled the tank, Bettye and Candi asked the attendant
if they could use the bathroom. “Our bathroom ain’t for niggers”,
came the reply. Hearing this George said “If we’re not good enough
to use your bathroom, we don’t want your gas”. They paid the few
dollars for the petrol they’d already pumped and got out of there as quickly
as possible. A story like that makes you think again about Bettye’s duet
with Buck Owens. It brings home exactly how radical it was for black and white
musicians to be working together back then. I’ve always felt that the records
made in the South in the mid-to-late sixties must have helped ease the racial
tensions that had so nearly torn parts of America to pieces just a few years
before. Wayne Shuler was a good old white boy from Louisiana and Bettye was a
black girl from the same State, but the records they made together are neither
black or white; they’re just soul records, great soul records.
Bettye Swann never did call me back, so I called her again. She was on her way
out but we chatted for a few minutes and she explained, “The best thing
about show business I loved was actually singing, making music and interacting
with people, but it wasn’t always 100% fun and there were some rough times,
really rough times, so I just stopped.”
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