After recording what was supposed to be her first album and long-awaited breakthrough in the music industry, vocalist Bettye LaVette got a phone call. The record executive on the other end of the line informed her that the release titled Child of the Seventies was not going to be put out by Atlantic Records. “I hung up the phone and got under the dining room table,” LaVette recalls. “I stayed under there about four or five days. I would just come out to go to the bathroom. That’s all I did. I stayed under there and drank wine for four or five days and smoked joints.”

That was back in 1972, and for the next 30 years, the powerhouse vocalist was bruised and battered by the music industry.

She joined the touring company for the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar and tried to jumpstart her career by joining Motown Records in 1982.

Looking back on those days, LaVette jokes that there was only one thing that kept her pushing to be a popular musician. “I can only attribute that to stupidity,” she says. “There was nothing happening that would make me keep doing this. After a while, it’s kind of like staying with a guy who beats you. It’s no longer love. It’s just there somehow.”

Just a few years ago, LaVette finally started to get some breaks within the music industry. It all happened after a French music collector found the master tapes to Child of the Seventies and finally released the album, which led to a resurgence of interest in LaVette. That helped lead Anti Records– home to an eclectic array of artists, including Mavis Staples, Merle Haggard and Tom Waits– to sign the vocalist. In 2005, LaVette issued I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise on Anti-featuring covers of songs by contemporary acts like Aimee Mann, Lucinda Williams and Dolly Parton.

While the album was a critical hit, LaVette’s next CD is the one she had been trying to make her whole life. Returning to Alabama’s Muscle Shoals Studios, where she recorded Child of the Seventies more than 30 years earlier, LaVette embarked on an unlikely collaboration with the alt-country outfit the Drive-By Truckers for her 2007 album The Scene of the Crime.

“I’m sure they looked at me as dictatorial,” she says of working with the group. “I’m sure they wanted to shoot me on some days, but they didn’t. They showed up, and they kept doing what I asked them to do. And it wound up sounding like I wanted it to sound.”

Throughout The Scene of the Crime, LaVette attacks the vocals as if it’s her last chance at ever having a music career. One amazing number is a take on Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers,” where LaVette pulls out all the stops. She sings in a sandpaper whisper, where she sounds ravaged by hard living. She chuckles in character and then sings lines like, “How do they know what it’s like to have a graveyard as a friend,” with so much emotion it raises goose bumps.

Since its release, The Scene of the Crime has racked up impressive accolades. The CD garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album and no doubt contributed to LaVette being pronounced the 2008 Contemporary Blues Female Artist at the Blues Music Awards this past May. The recognition has the vocalist feeling her skills finally have been validated.

“I feel relieved, baby,” LaVette says. “I feel I was frightened. It’s like someone rescued you from a well or certain death. I thought I was going to die old, obscure, broke.”

Despite all she has been through, LaVette says her hardships have made her a better performer. But she says that she has other advice for aspiring acts hoping to achieve some level of fame in the music industry. “My first instruction is if you know how to do anything else,” LaVette says, “do it.”

BETTYE LAVETTE performs on the Monterey Bay Blues Festival’s Main Arena Stage Friday from 8:20 to 9:50pm.