By Kimberly Chun

A SUNDAY EVENING in Las Vegas, well after church – I figure it's a good time to trace the tracks of mysterious 1960s and '70s soul singer Bettye Swann. But after consulting the phone directory, I learn, contrary to the liner notes to the recent Bettye Swann compilation (Honest Jons/Astralwerks), that there's only one woman going by Swann's married name, Betty Barton, in the 702. The odds are low, but I try it anyway, and a woman with a grandmotherly voice answers the phone, confirming that she's Betty Barton.

"Uh, you don't happen to be Bettye Swann?" I ask, feeling like a dolt.

"No, I'm Betty Barton."

So, yes, Swann, a.k.a. Barton, born Betty Jean Champion on Oct. 24, 1944, in Shreveport, La., has effectively disappeared into the mists of civilian life. That, for her, includes work with children with "educational problems," according to Tim Tooher, who wrote the liner notes to Bettye Swann. Those kids' gain is our loss – though is it a loss if most people don't even know who Swann is?

Listening to Bettye Swann seep from my CD clock radio, I study the extra e and n in her stage name. They're subtle hints of the low-key originality that slips into so many of this underappreciated vocalist's songs, which, as Tooher puts it, "seem like the missing link between Muscle Shoals and Motown," an inviting bridge between soul and country, between black and white worlds. Even as the civil rights era reached its boiling point, sweet-voiced Swann found herself in the middle of a quickly squelched firestorm when the possibility arose of her cutting a duet with Buck Owens of Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again" and appearing with Owens on the popular Hee Haw. Even two years after Charley Pride appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, the possibility of white country star Owens singing a love song with an African American woman, one eager to cover C&W for a black soul audience, was enough to make heads over at Capitol's country division twirl.

Though Swann evidently had her pride, she was no Pride – nor was she a soul queen like Aretha, holding court at awards shows, phoning it in over the years, and reclining on her considerable laurels. Despite hits like 1967's "Make Me Yours," on Money Records, and stirred memories when her 1972 R&B top 20 tune "Victim of a Foolish Heart" (Atlantic) was covered by Joss Stone in 2003, Swann seems to have willed herself off stages and sound systems, turning down interview requests as insinuatingly as she has worked her way onto my player.

Bettye Swann doesn't include "Make Me" and "Victim," and absent are her earliest Money singles, like 1964's "Don't Wait Too Long," as well as later Philly soul singles, like 1974's "The Boy Next Door," though the disc does boast the 1968 single "Don't Touch Me" and Swann's tumescent, romantic 1969 take on the '50s standard "Little Things Mean a Lot" – which has you audibly gulping for air along with Swann, who takes it slow and sensual like early Aaron Neville while good-old-boy producer Wayne Shuler's usually nicely restrained arrangements of brass and piano simmer down to a dead silence. Rather, in spite of the presence of sprightly Swann originals like "(My Heart Is) Closed for the Season," "I'm Lonely for You," and "Don't Let It Happen to Us" (notable for her feather-light approach and the songs' never-effortful bounce), Bettye Swann is a testament to the laid-back strength of her interpretive abilities, particularly when it comes to country, rock, and pop.

Never overwrought, loath to overplay a lyric, and rarely too out of hand, Swann has a way of singing slightly behind the beat on these covers that's as relaxed, leisurely, and confidently contained as a slow, humid cruise in a muscle car through a moss-slung, familiar neighborhood, with Swann gracefully sliding into the back end of a groove like it's a leather bucket seat. The desperation, excess, and melismata mainlined by other vocalists have evaporated in the low heat, as has the cool swing of Dusty Springfield and the higher-power intensity of Aretha. Though Swann and Shuler seem to prefer upbeat arrangements, it's almost as if the vocalist can take or leave these songs, this life, this game, even as she quietly puts her own imprint on other songwriters' numbers, like Otis Redding's "Chained and Bound," the Bee Gees' "Words," "Today I Started Loving You Again" (with a lovely, down-low delivery by Swann amid strident brass-a-go-go action), and Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill's "Stand by Your Man" (more lame horn blare, like bad traffic, as Swann punches in between the beats). The final three songs – Chip Taylor's "Angel in the Morning," Classics IV's "Traces," and especially Tony Joe White's rural interracial harmony idyll "Willie and Laura Mae Jones" – nail it for me every time, sending me into a curiosity spiral about what became of the woman hidden in these subdued grooves.

As Swann told Tooher, "I wanted to do any song I was given my way ... the way I felt it." Similarly, when music stopped being fun, she detached herself from that world and moved to Vegas with her husband and manager, George Barton, in the '70s, offering, "It wasn't always 100 percent fun and there were some rough times, really rough times, so I just stopped." Likewise, these songs are a mild, sublime refuge, with Swann taking a dignified higher ground and playing the unifier, rather than divider or destroyer, during those "rough times," whether they came in the form of the discrimination Swann underwent on the road in the South, the scuttled Owens duet, or the everyday struggles of a supremely ladylike soul singer rising above a certain turbulent time and place.

To purchase the music featured in this article, visit iTunes:

1. Bettye Swann, Bettye Swann (Honest Jons/Astralwerks)