“This is how I got the waterfall,” laughs Bettye Lavette in a throaty chuckle only a soul singer of her calibre could manage. If anybody else with less than 45 years of experience attempted that kind of laugh, their vocal chords would implode. And the way Lavette enunciates “waterfall,” you imagine the thing was cut out of the Thailand bedrock and dragged by a herd of mastodons to the grotto of a mansion in Beverly Hills next to Diana Ross and Gladys Knight. In reality, the waterfall is just a modest fixture in the garden of her home in the New Jersey suburbs. A gift to herself for “finally making it,” as she puts it. Unlike her contemporaries in soul music, Lavette is only now, at 61, getting her due.
    “Being finally recognized and a comeback are two different things,” she says. “I’m not coming back. I haven’t been anywhere. I’m just being finally recognized. I haven’t been someone who’s trying to break into show business, I’ve done this instead of eat or love. I’ve done everything you could possibly do in this business, except make the money.”
    The heartache and bitterness typically reserved for songs like “How Am I Different” and “Let Me Down Easy,” unadorned of melody or groove, slips through. But then it’s gone, replaced by Lavette’s laugh. “I only got so much energy anyways. If they made me as big as Beyonce, that could kill me.”
    Lavette’s voice certainly measures up to the greats of Motown. On her last critically acclaimed album, I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, her voice is timeless. Recalling Wilson Pickett, it sounds as if it sat in a glass of bourbon for a month in a bar full of smoke and slivers of broken love. So familiar is her voice, you’d swear she was the answer to the Trivial Pursuit question you always miss, her songs permanently balancing on the tip of your tongue.
    The multitude of awards, the sold-out shows and celebrity advocates like Elvis Costello, seem to have appeared overnight, as if filling an unnatural vacuum in the music cosmos. For all intents and purposes, she was always here as a soul legend. But before French DJ Gilles Petard rediscovered her in 1999 (from a record long shelved by Atlantic after the first single on it flopped in the ’60s), her career consisted mostly of near-misses and frustrating anonymity. Despite record deals with Atlantic, Lavette had trouble releasing an album, and singles released on several other labels remained right outside the gilded gates of the pop top 100.
    “Most of the time I was going place to place, trying to follow a record contract or a gig,” recalls Lavette of her career. “After you’ve had a record on Atlantic, or two or three of them, it gives you a bit of an attitude. You don’t want to be known as a singer, you want to be known as Bettye Lavette. Usually I’d go to a place as Bettye Lavette, but get stuck there and end up as a singer.”
    Unlike her peers, Lavette’s songs aren’t used to sell hamburgers and shampoos. Accountants don’t punctuate her songs with apologies to restless audiences at karaoke nights. No VH1’s Behind the Music or haggling memories of fame for a spot on some reality show. Instead, Lavette retained her dignity, but it wasn’t enough to be occasionally dug up by Northern Soul collectors at garage sales. This was a woman who lived up the street from Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding and went to high school with the Temptations. As one of the more promising singers in the Detroit scene at the time, she feels she should have come up with these soul legends.
    “The people I grew up with in Detroit, knowing them since when we were all completely broke, it’s been extremely humiliating for me,” says Lavette. “I started before Motown got big and then didn’t make it. Having my name in all these newspapers and magazines (now) is an absolute relief. While I wasn’t doing anything, I was always connected with somebody who was. I was always around. That’s what made me so angry. So few of the people in that Detroit community helped me. The people who helped me were from everywhere else. Everything good that has happened in my career has happened somewhere else. I couldn’t make it in my old hometown.
    “I remember running into The O’Jays during the height of them finally being discovered. We’ve always been very close. I walked into their dressing room and told them how proud I was of them. This was the first time I had seen them since we were all living in the same hotel room. They asked, ‘What have you been doing?’ I said, ‘Starving to death.’ And they said, ‘Damn it looks great on you.’”
    Throughout that period in her career, Lavette didn’t do anything but sing. A role in a Broadway musical, an ill-advised attempt to cash in on disco while signed to Motown in 1982, gigs every night for two years in New Orleans, all paying just enough for her to get by. And still she did not quit, though not for the lack of trying.
    “I had a lot of support,” she says. “I wanted to quit every week. It wasn’t fortitude, it wasn’t the show must go on, it was people who kept telling me ‘do not quit,’ and paying my bills. I’ve already felt really bad and done this under auspices that were degrading as far as I was concerned. I had the opportunity to become very good while still being driven by an anger and a need to show I’m just as good as they are. That has kept my weight down, kept me off of drugs, kept letting other people punch me in the face. I am ready for my money.”
    Anticipation is building for Lavette’s new album,, Scene of the Crime, a collaboration with Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers, which should be in stores September 25. Her shows continue to sell out, as awards and congratulations from old friends fill her Jersey home. With new-found success comes the opportunity to move on, and no longer obsess about the music.
    “It’s like making love,” she says. “Unless you’re young or have a strange problem, you don’t think about making love all the time. You enjoy it when you’re doing it. You talk to these (young) people who have to have everything around them perfect to get into the mood and think about it for a really long time. That’s not me. I’m not very artsy.”
    Forget artsy. Bettye Lavette, after decades of struggling back from irrelevance, would much rather get paid.