Bettye LaVette sings forward at World Café Live

Bettye LaVette is the Rodney Dangerfield of the soul-music game. She didn't get quite enough respect (or paydays) early in her career, and what respect she got, she earned. On display Wednesday night at World Café Live were the reasons she did: her sultry voice, poise, eccentric songbook, and determination to play by her own rules.

The energetic LaVette, 69, did it her way because there was no other way. "Philly, I'm going to chide you guys for ignoring me for 34 years," she said with a laugh, before kicking into Wednesday's set.

With a voice as sinewy as her frame, LaVette didn't wallow in the mess of her past, hits that never came, labels and producers that never worked out. Most of those demons were exorcised in her 2012 memoir A Woman Like Me.

At World Café, LaVette looked forward, fronting a mighty, tight, and intuitive quartet. "I'm going to sing my new CD, top to bottom," she said. That would be her January-released Worthy and it's first track, Bob Dylan's "Unbelievable."

LaVette made that (and every other) tune her own. She said she was all about highlighting the songwriter, which she did at every turn. She cut into every rhyming Dylanism - dignified, sanctified, satisfied, analyzed - as her band tapped an ominous, piano-led pulse. The slow blues of "When I Was a Young Girl" (by Savoy Brown's Chris Youlden) brought out the grit in her voice. In "Bless Us All" (from the late Mickey Newbury), she sang of drunks and fools, toying with her vibrato and mirroring the sonic wiggle of guitarist Brett Lucas.

At times, LaVette sounded like a lithe Tina Turner with a scuffed tone. She took on a haughty theatricality, heightened during Joe Henry's spare "Stop." Some of that rough drama figured in the Rolling Stones' "Complicated," as she screamed like a banshee though the fade-out. She gave the audience something to cry over during "Just Between You and Me and the Wall, You're a Fool" (from James H. Brown Jr.), a twilighted organ blues that found her wailing a "bad baby" lament, repetitively, with pleading passion.

LaVette wasn't going to let the audience go home without her classics, or without poking fun at them. After mentioning how Philadelphia radio missed the boat on her, even when she had hits such as her first big tune, the teasing bar blues of "My Man," she performed that track with robust sensuality, just to show us what we could have had all those years.