Soul music veteran Bettye LaVette sees things come full circle with her 2007 studio release The Scene of the Crime. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama (“the scene of the crime”), 35 years after her 1972 album, Child of the Seventies, was shelved by Atlantic Records, it fires back on all cylinders. “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye Lavette),” the one original composition co-written with producer and Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood, captures LaVette’s deep pain and bitterness over this career-inhibiting move. Elsewhere, she employs the same tough, schooled and scarred voice for a well-chosen collection of tunes, from the gentle dissipation of Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces,” the wry truths of the George Jones hit “Choices” and the out-of-left-field cover of Elton John’s “Talking Old Soldiers” that immediately becomes an R&B standard in LaVette’s experienced hands. Drive-By Truckers and Muscle Shoals veterans David Hood and Spooner Oldham provide solid, restrained backing that make this a modern, yet essentially undated and unpretentious, soul music recording.