Betty Davis - Crashin' From Passion
One of my favorite recordings of Betty Davis isn't a song. In the summer of 1974, the funk singer/songwriter appeared on Al Gee's Rap N' Rhythm, a nationally syndicated interview program that was regularly pressed to vinyl and sent to radio stations by the U.S. Army Reserve. Betty had just turned 30 and was about to start her first tour to help promote her second studio album, They Say I'm Different. Their conversation barely lasted 20 minutes, so Gee could only ask a short series of boilerplate questions about her creative process and astrological sign. Nonetheless, there's this delightful moment where Betty is asked to describe her musical style and she responds in a distinctive Pittsburgh-by-way-of-Greensboro drawl: "I would just say it's raw ... r-a-w."
For many musicians, this kind of casually playful back-and-forth might not be revelatory, but that changes if you consider that the Rap N' Rhythm session is, as far as I know, the only extant recorded interview of Betty in the '70s. As such, it's one of the only times where we get a glimpse of her outside her musical persona, and the contrast is startling. Betty the funk artist was irrepressibly rowdy and raucous, a larger-than-life personality who could command a stage with little more than a pose. However, on Gee's program, Betty could be surprisingly soft-spoken, bordering on demure at times (though perhaps that was in response to Gee all but fawning over her). After her "r-a-w" line, she and Gee share a laugh. The first time I heard the recording I realized that, despite having interviewed Betty numerous times between 2007-09, I couldn't recall ever hearing her laugh before. It was nice.
Betty Mabry Davis, who passed away early Wednesday morning in Pittsburgh at the age of 77, was an intensely enigmatic artist, having spent the first 30 years of her life on a remarkable ascent into the spotlight only to utterly vanish from public view for the next 30 years. Up until 2007, when the first legitimate reissues of her music began to roll out, the primary way you would have discovered her at all was by randomly finding one of her three studio albums in a record store bin. Once you did though, it was like being let in on a secret that you instantly wanted to share with others.
Her songs were filled with gritty yet sultry style of electrified funk — dirtier than James with more blues than Sly. Likewise, as a vocalist, she shared little in common with her gospel-trained contemporaries with their perfect pitch and vocal control; she took her cues from growling blues singers like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Moreover, she was doing all this as an unapologetically outspoken, sexually empowered performer who shocked the Black cultural establishment of her time. Both musically and professionally, she was an artist without much precedent nor peer and because of that, she's been the object of constant fascination and inspiration for decades. I always think of how Joi, the accomplished neo-soul singer/songwriter, once told me that when she was first introduced to Betty's music almost 30 years ago, it was a "revelation that I was not alone."
It's important to remember that prior to (and even after) Betty's recording career, most of the prominent women in funk were managed by male songwriters and producers: think Marva Whitney and Lyn Collins (James Brown) or Parlet and The Brides of Funkenstein (George Clinton). In contrast, Betty wrote almost every song she ever recorded and produced most of her own studio albums, working with musicians she hand-picked. Few Black women in the music industry have ever enjoyed that level of creative autonomy so early in their careers: not her '70s contemporaries like Tina Turner or Chaka Khan, nor later artists she's sometimes compared to, like Janet Jackson or Beyoncé.
Even with her short-lived and abusive marriage to Miles Davis in the late '60s, she seemed a bigger influence on him than the other way around. While he helped produce a series of demo songs for her in 1969, they didn't land her a deal at the time; she did that on her own several years after their divorce. Meanwhile, Miles put her visage on the cover of his 1968 LP, Filles de Kilimanjaro, which included the song "Mademoiselle Mabry." Importantly, Betty introduced Miles to her own friends like Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. Not coincidentally, this was also the time when Miles began his turn towards jazz-rock fusion, culminating in his landmark 1970 electrified album, Bitches Brew. In his 1990 autobiography, Miles only devoted a few pages to their relationship — much of it unflattering — but he at least acknowledged that she was "talented as a motherf*****" and "a big influence on my personal life as well as my musical life," opining that "If Betty were singing today she'd be like Madonna; something like Prince."
In essence, Miles was making the same observation that many others have regarding Betty: She was the embodiment of being "ahead of her time." But while that's intended as a compliment, it also suggests that, in Betty's day, her talents went overlooked or underappreciated. One of her first recorded songs was titled "Get Ready For Betty," but as it turns out, the world wasn't ready for her. From: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/13/1080151853/game-was-her-middle-name-the-world-was-never-ready-for-betty-davis
