November 15, 2010 Issue

Alec Wilkinson’s “Long Time Coming” is easily Pick of the Issue this week. It wasn’t a sure thing until, about fifteen hundred words into the piece, I encountered this dandy line: “‘I was the first person in my family to make a hundred dollars a day,’ LaVette said when I visited her in West Orange recently.” I read that and instantly could feel myself relaxing, slowing down, to savor the writing. “Long Time Coming” is about Bettye LaVette, “the last great vernacular black singer,” whose career has been plagued by “buzzard luck, which is bad luck that won’t end.” LaVette is a curious amalgam of toughness and sadness. As a singer, she is adept at expressing anguish. I’d never heard of her before I read Wilkinson’s piece. When I finished it, I went to iTunes and downloaded her Kennedy Centers Honors performance of “Love Reign O’er Me.” Her “raspy, full-throated cry” (Wilkinson’s accurate description) is electric. But it’s Wilkinson’s writing that I’m mainly interested in. The intricately worked plainness of it often brings it to the edge of poetry. Consider for example this memorable passage from “Long Time Coming”:

“After the final night of the tour, in Miami, LaVette came back to the hotel with a paper place mat signed by Plant and members of his band and a plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it. She extended the dinner box toward me and said, “You hold this,” then she went up to her room and changed and came back to the bar and ordered champagne.”

How fine those acutely seen details (“paper place mat signed by Plant and members of the band,” “plastic dinner box that had four shrimp and a chicken leg in it,” “came back to the bar and ordered champagne”) are! If beauty lives in the harmonious excitement of particulars, as John Updike said it does, that passage is sublime.

Postscript: The vivid, red-tinged Eric Ogden photo of LaVette that illustrates “Long Time Coming” is terrific. Ogden is rapidly becoming the magazine’s premier photographer.