#Betty Davis #funk #R&B #soul #funk rock #singer-songwriter #1970s
Picture yourself in a hot sweaty New York City nightclub in 1969, surrounded by the musical elite: Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone. The drums are pounding, an out-of-tune guitar is wailing. A beautiful woman crawls across the stage, growling into the microphone, her voice summoning fierce femininity and raw sexual energy, taking rock ‘n’ roll into a new era of sound — gritty, unbridled and raunchy. No, it’s not Janis Joplin or Tina Turner. Her name is Betty Davis. But no one would fault you if this wasn’t your first guess. When Betty Davis died on Feb. 9, the world lost a groundbreaking artist who created and inspired many of the famous sounds of the 1970s, and yet her name was omitted from the lexicon of musical history until recently. Obituaries are pouring forth, lauding her genius and contributions and lamenting her lack of commercial success. What very few of these official records of Davis’ life will state outright, however, is that her lack of recognition was a direct result of misogyny and racism.
Growing up in 1990s Berkeley, I had no clue Betty Davis existed. Bay Area rock was Santana, the Grateful Dead, Journey. Rock ‘n’ roll spoke to this 14-year-old Black girl’s alienation and frustration with the world, but also perpetuated those same feelings of alienation. I was the lone Black female face at every concert I went to. Local bands Green Day and Rancid were carrying on Berkeley’s rock legacy, yet that lineage was consistently represented as male and mostly white. I first learned about her by reading Miles Davis’ autobiography. By this point I was a professional background singer touring with local funk bands. Even as I performed with artists such as George Clinton or sang alongside members of Fishbone, I still thought my role in rock was to support a man musically. In his book, Miles described his second wife as an unparalleled performer. The woman who inspired his 1970 album “Bitches Brew.” The woman who changed his style and musical ear. It was an inspiring recollection of her. But Betty Davis remained a rock ‘n’ roll mirage. What happened to her? How had this larger-than-life woman been reduced to an anecdote in her ex-husband’s book?
In 1968, Betty Davis (then Betty Mabry) was a fixture of the New York club scene. She had built somewhat of a name for herself as a songwriter, most notably penning the Chambers Brothers’ hit “Uptown (to Harlem).” Known for her wild stage antics, flamboyant fashion and sexual magnetism, she was primed for stardom. She was friends with Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. She went from dating South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela to marrying American trumpeter Miles Davis in 1968. By the next year, she was recording her first album for Columbia Records with her husband at the helm. Betty Davis embodied punk rock and brought feminine sexuality to the fore, long before Madonna writhed in a wedding dress singing “Like a Virgin.” She created gritty punk/funk long before Rick James proclaimed it as his own. She bought Miles Davis his first wah-wah pedal, inspiring his foray into fusion with “Bitches Brew.” She was gestating the future of music but, even then, the record execs balked at her fierce rock ‘n’ roll. When her relationship with Miles dissolved, her recordings were shelved in a vault. Leaving New York behind, Betty migrated to San Francisco, finding communion within the Bay Area’s music community. Recorded at San Francisco’s renowned Wally Heider Studios, her debut album, “Betty Davis,” featured the region’s top musicians, including members of Sly & the Family Stone, Santana and the Pointer Sisters. It was a confident, alluring funk record, and it declared her prowess as both a woman and a rock star. She followed it up with “They Say I’m Different,” recorded at Sausalito’s Record Plant, and “Nasty Gal,” for which she went back to New York. Davis released these albums in a burst of creative energy, one each year from 1973 to 1975. Betty’s music should have fit right into the social climate of free love, feminism and civil rights in 1970s San Francisco. Instead, the public backlash was swift and crippling. The NAACP teamed up with conservative church groups to have her banned from radio for “indecency.” She was boycotted. Prevented from performing. Her album sales floundered. While white women were allowed to be sexually liberated in the free-love era, Black women were not. While Black men were allowed to gyrate onstage, Black women were not. The same sexual magnetism that made Robert Plant famous was indecent coming from Betty Davis. The American people couldn’t handle a fully empowered Black woman like Betty Davis making rock ‘n’ roll.
Eventually her music went out of print, and she went on to live a quiet private life far from her previous incarnation as a punk-funk queen. Then, as the decades passed, the tides began to change. In 2007, I opened a copy of The Chronicle with the headline “A funk queen steps out of the shadows,” written by acclaimed music critic Jeff Chang, about two of Betty Davis’ albums being rereleased. I clipped the article, ran to Amoeba Records and listened to her music. In the newspaper’s picture, I saw myself. In the music, I heard who I could be as a funk diva. With each Betty Davis rerelease, multitudes of young Black women have been able to see their embodied selves through her music. And thankfully, Betty, who died at 77, lived long enough to see it. Nearly 50 years after the release of her debut alum, Betty Davis has legions of disciples, each of us born from her vision of Black female empowerment. Amongst my local community of Black women in rock, I hear these sentiments echoed. “She showed me I could have raunchy, sex-kitten swag, and still be soft,” Oakland rock musician Femi Andrades told me. “Her music gave permission to express my rage, my sexuality, myself, unfiltered. Raw.” Berkeley singer-songwriter Viveca Hawkins said simply, “I’m grateful to know that it’s OK to be that bold.”
From: https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/how-betty-davis-paved-the-way-for-black-women-in-rock-and-funk
