Betty Davis

Betty Davis (born Betty Mabry, July 26, 1945)^[1] is an American funk and soul singer. She is frequently praised as a music pioneer who was well ahead of her time and a performer who was known for her memorable live shows.

Background

Born in 1945, Betty Mabry grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and just outside Pittsburgh. On her grandmother’s farm in Reidsville, North Carolina, she listened to B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and Elmore James and other blues musicians. One of the first songs she wrote, at the age of twelve, was called "I’m Going to Bake That Cake of Love."

Aged 16, she left Pittsburgh for New York City, enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology while living with her aunt. She soaked up the Greenwich Village culture and folk music of the early 1960s. She associated herself with frequenters of the Cellar, a hip uptown club where young and stylish people congregated. It was a multiracial, artsy crowd of models, design students, actors, and singers. At the Cellar she played records and chatted people up. She also worked as a model, appearing in photo spreads in Seventeen, Ebony and Glamour.^[2]

In her time in New York, she met several musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The seeds of her musical career were planted through her friendship with soul singer Lou Courtney, who produced her first single, “The Cellar” with simple, catchy lyrics like, “Where you going fellas, so fly? / I’m going to the Cellar, my oh my / What you going to do there / We’re going to boogaloo there.”

The single was a local jam for the Cellar. Yet her first professional gig was not until she wrote "Uptown (to Harlem)" for the Chambers Brothers. Their 1967 album was a major success, but Betty Mabry was focusing on her modeling career. She was successful as a model but felt bored by the work. According to Oliver Wang’s They Say I’m Different liner notes, she said, “I didn’t like modeling because you didn’t need brains to do it. It’s only going to last as long as you look good.”

Marriage to Miles Davis

She met Miles Davis in 1967 and married him in September 1968. In just one year of marriage, she influenced him greatly by introducing him to the fashions and the new popular music trends of the era. In his autobiography, Miles credited Betty with helping to plant the seeds of his future musical explorations by introducing the trumpeter to psychedelic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and funk innovator Sly Stone. The Miles Davis album Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968) includes a song named after her and her photo on the front cover.

Miles believed that Hendrix and Betty had an affair which supposedly hastened the end of their marriage, but Betty denies this. Hendrix and Miles stayed close after the divorce, planning to record until Hendrix's death. The influence of Hendrix and especially Sly Stone on Miles Davis was obvious on the album Bitches Brew (1970), which ushered in the era of jazz fusion. The origin of the album's title is unknown, but some believe Miles was subtly paying tribute to Betty and her girlfriends. In fact, it is said that he originally wanted to call the album Witches Brew—it was Betty who convinced him to change it.^[3]

Music career

As Betty Mabry, she recorded "Get Ready For Betty" b/w "I'm Gonna Get My Baby Back" in 1964 for DCP International. Sometime in that same era, she also dueted with Roy Arlington and under their joint name "Roy and Betty," released a single for Safice entitled, "I'll Be There."

Betty's first major credit was writing "Uptown (to Harlem)" for the Chambers Brothers, 1967.

In 1968, when she was still involved with Hugh Masekela, she recorded several songs for Columbia Records, with Masekela doing the arrangements. Two of them were released as a single: "Live, Love, Learn" b/w "It's My Life." Her relationship with Miles Davis began soon after her breakup from Masekela and in the spring of 1969, Betty returned to Columbia's 52nd St. Studios to record a series of demo tracks, with Miles and Teo Macero producing. At least five songs were taped during those sessions, three of which were Mabry originals, two of which were covers of Cream and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Miles attempted to use these demo songs to secure an album deal for Betty but neither Columbia nor Atlantic were interested and they were archived into a vault until 2016 for the compilation, Betty Davis, The Columbia Years, 1968-69, released by Seattle's Light in the Attic Records.

After the end of her marriage with Davis, Betty moved to London, probably around 1971, to pursue her modeling career. She wrote music while in the UK and returned to the US around 1972 with the intention of recording songs with Santana. Instead, she recorded her own songs with a group of West Coast funk musicians. Her first record, Betty Davis, was released in 1973. She had two minor hits on the Billboard R&B chart: "If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up", which reached no. 66 in 1973, and "Shut Off the Lights", which reached no. 97 in 1975.^[4] Davis released two more studio albums, They Say I'm Different (1974) and her major label debut on Island Records Nasty Gal (1975). None of the three albums was a commercial success.

Davis remained a cult figure as a singer, due in part to her open sexual attitude, which was controversial for the time. Some of her shows were boycotted, and her songs were not played on the radio due to pressure by religious groups and the NAACP.^[5]

Both Betty Davis (1973) and They Say I'm Different (1974) were re-released by Light in the Attic Records on May 1, 2007. In September 2009, Light in the Attic Records reissued Nasty Gal and her unreleased fourth studio album recorded in 1976, re-titled as Is It Love or Desire? (the original title was Crashin' from Passion). Both reissues contained extensive liner notes and shed some light on the mystery of why her fourth album, considered possibly to be her best work by many members of her band (Herbie Hancock, Chuck Rainey, Alphonse Mouzon), was shelved by the record label and remained unreleased for 33 years. After a final recording session in 1979, Davis eventually stopped making music and returned to Pennsylvania.

Material from the 1979 recording session was eventually used for two bootleg albums, Hangin' Out in Hollywood (1995) and Crashin' from Passion (1996). A greatest hits album, Anti Love: The Best of Betty Davis, was released in 2000.

Discography

Singles

Studio albums

Compilation

Unofficial releases

• Hangin' Out in Hollywood (1995) (Charly) / Crashin' from Passion (Razor & Tie) (1996)
  • Compilation of material recorded in 1979 and released in 1995 and 1996 without the artist's consent
• Anti Love: The Best of Betty Davis (2000) (UFoxy)
  • Compilation
• This Is It! Anthology (2005) (Vampisoul)
  • Compilation

References

Literature

• Liner notes to Light in the Attic Records' 2007 re-issue of Betty Davis' self-titled 1973 debut album.

External links

• Betty Davis Documentary by Native Voice Films – Coming in 2016: Betty Davis speaks on camera about her life.
• The Sound of Young America: Betty Davis Interview – June 21, 2007: Betty Davis gives her first radio interview in 30 years.
• J. Hayes, "The Beautiful Dichotomy of Betty Davis: A Rare Conversation with the Elusive Mistress of Funk", interview, February 2010
• Neil Spencer, "Miles Davis: The muse who changed him, and the heady Brew that rewrote jazz", The Guardian, 5 September 2010 - includes 2010 interview with Betty Davis.
• Betty Davis: Betty Davis – Album review
• Betty Davis at AllMusic