Betty Davis (July 26, 1944 – February 9, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter, and model. She was known for her controversial sexually-oriented lyrics and performance style and was the second wife of trumpeter Miles Davis. Her AllMusic profile describes her as "a wildly flamboyant funk diva with few equals who combined the gritty emotional realism of Tina Turner, the futurist fashion sense of David Bowie, and the trendsetting flair of Miles Davis".
She was born Betty Gray Mabry in Durham, North Carolina. She developed an interest in music when she was about ten, and was introduced to various blues musicians by her grandmother, Beulah Blackwell, while staying at her farm in Reidsville. At 12, she wrote one of her first songs, "I'm Going to Bake That Cake of Love". The family relocated to Homestead, Pennsylvania, so her father, Henry Mabry, could work at a Pennsylvania steel mill. Davis attended and graduated Homestead High School. She decided to pursue a career in showbusiness after watching her father dance like Elvis Presley.
Betty (named after her mother) left home and high school for New York in 1960, aged 16, after winning a place at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. “She knew she was going to be something, and we all knew it,” her brother Chuck told an interviewer. “We just didn’t know what.” Gravitating to Greenwich Village, she became immersed in a culture where styles and races mixed. Her looks brought her work as a model for fashion shoots in Ebony, Seventeen and Glamour magazines and for designers including Halston and Norma Kamali, but music was equally important to her. She DJed at a Village club and made a couple of singles without success before writing a song, Uptown (to Harlem), which appeared on a hit album by the Chambers Brothers in 1967.
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| Betty & Miles Davis |
When she met Davis, introduced by Devon Wilson, Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend, Mabry had just ended a relationship with the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela. Davis had recently divorced his first wife, the dancer Frances Taylor. At the time he was trying to find a way out of the confines of a world where his adoring audiences expected him to wear narrow-cut Italian suits in fine fabrics while exploring the pensive cadences of My Funny Valentine in the way that had brought him fame and wealth.
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Under his new wife’s influence, Davis listened to Hendrix and Sly Stone. “Whatever I got into, he got into,” she said. He put her picture on the cover of an album, Filles de Kilimanjaro, which included a long track titled Mademoiselle Mabry, based on a lick from a Hendrix song, The Wind Cries Mary. His former wardrobe was replaced by buckskin-fringed jackets, silk scarves and freaky sunglasses. Over a band blending rock textures with bottom-heavy funk beats, he played trumpet through a wah-wah pedal. The marriage lasted barely a year, during which he tried and failed to get her a recording contract. It ended, in Betty’s account, when he turned violent after becoming convinced (wrongly, she maintained) that she was having an affair with Hendrix.
In 1971 Betty Davis – as she would continue to be known – spent several months in London, where she was befriended by Marc Bolan and continued to write songs. Returning to the US, she made three albums – Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different and Nasty Gal – between 1973 and 1975, raising many eyebrows but little consumer interest. 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.
Davis remained a cult figure as a singer, due in part to her unabashedly sexual lyrics and performance style, which were both controversial for the time. She had success in Europe, but in the U.S. she was barred from performing on television because of her sexually aggressive stage persona. Some of her shows were boycotted, and her songs were not played on the radio due to pressure by religious groups and the NAACP. In 1980, Davis' father died which prompted her return to the US to live with her mother in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Davis struggled to overcome her father's death, and subsequent mental illness. She acknowledged that she suffered a setback at the time, but stayed in Homestead, accepted the end of her career, and lived a quiet life.
In 2017, an independent documentary directed by Phil Cox entitled Betty: They Say I'm Different, was released, which renewed interest in her life and music career. When Cox tracked Davis down, he found her living in the basement of a house with no internet, cell phone, or car. He said: "This wasn't a woman with riches or luxury. She was living on the bare essentials."
(Edited from Wikipedia & Richard Williams obit @ The Guardian)