Writer of In the Ghetto blended pop and country
Mac Davis, who has died aged 78, was a singer-songwriter who parlayed a string of hits for Elvis Presley into a varied career as an actor and recording artist, blending country and pop in charttopping songs such as Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me, and playing a quarterback in the football movie North Dallas Forty.
With a Texas drawl and country charm, Davis became a crossover country-pop success in the early 1970s, writing a No 1 song that started out as a jokewith his producer, and hosting his own musical variety show on TV for three years. At the time, he said: ‘‘I’m too country for pop and I’m too pop for country.’’
Davis initially worked as a recordlabel promoter and songwriter for other artists, collaborating with Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro as well as Kenny Rogers. He broadened his range even further in recent years, working with the Swedish DJ Avicii, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, and Bruno Mars.
As a composer, Davis was perhaps best known for hiswork for Presley. He was writing a song intended for Aretha Franklin, A Little Less Conversation, when it was picked up for Presley’s 1968movie musical Live a Little, Love a Little.
It was followed by hits including Memories, for
Presley’s 1968 comeback special on
NBC; Don’t
Cry Daddy, written amid the breakup of
Davis’s first marriage; and
In the Ghetto. The song reached
No 3 on the US charts.
While writing for Presley, Davis began performing his own music on TV variety shows, breaking through in 1972 with
Baby Don’t Get Hooked onme. He said he wrote it after producer Rickhall asked him to craft ‘‘a ‘hook’ song, one with a repeat phrase which is singles-oriented’’. As a joke, he took the prompt literally, suggesting the line, ‘‘Don’t get hooked on me.’’ It spent three weeks at No 1.
Davis had awry sense of humour that helped him jump from music to film and television, including in an episode of The Muppet Show in which he performed
Baby Don’t Get Hooked onme as a duet with Miss Piggy.
His film career cratered after The Sting II (1983), a disastrous follow-up to the Paul Newman and Robert Redford caper film, and Davis went into early retirement a few years later. He battled alcoholism before making his way to Broadway in 1992, taking over the title role in themusical Will Rogers Follies. He called it ‘‘the biggest turnaround inmy life’’, following three years in which he improved his golf game, fell deeper into whiskey and finally checked himself into the Betty Ford Centre.
By most accounts, he was born Morris Mac Davis in Lubbock.
His parents divorced when he was 9, and he turned from religious music to the rebellious new rock ’n’ roll of artists like Presley and Buddy Holly, a fellow Lubbock native.
His marriages to Fran Cook and Sarah Barg, who latermarried his friend Glen Campbell, ended in divorce. In the early 1980s he married Lise Gerard, a nurse. He had a son from his first marriage, and two sons from his third, who all survive him. – Washington Post