Betty Davis
Trailblazer of funk BORN 1945 “I figured it would be better to have them cover me when I was alive than when I was dead,” said Betty Davis of her decision to end decades of silence and participate in the 2017 documentary Betty: They Say I’m Different. She consented to be heard but not seen, preferring not to dilute memories of her mid-’70s incarnation as the Afro-futurist funk-rock warrior queen that the music industry didn’t know what to do with.
Born Betty Gray Mabry, she grew up in North Carolina and Pennsylvania before hightailing it to New York to study fashion. A Greenwich Village scenester, she released sporadic singles and sold Uptown to The Chambers Brothers, but it was as a pioneering black model that she first found success, and how she met Miles Davis. He introduced her to Rachmaninov and Stravinsky; she turned him on to Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and suggested the name ‘Bitches Brew’. Their volcanic marriage only lasted a year, but she earned the surname.
The three albums that Davis recorded between 1973 and 1975 were a revolution in black female self-expression. On songs such as Nasty Gal, Anti-Love Song and He Was A Big Freak, her throaty roar and unconquerable carnality made her a controversial trailblazer, boycotted by the NAACP for setting a bad example. “If Betty were singing today, she’d be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman,” Miles wrote in 1989. “She was ahead of her time.”
Too far ahead, it turned out. As Davis lamented in 1975, “The one thing that I wish was an advantage, but isn’t, is being the first to do something.” She was dropped by Island before she could release her fourth album, and checked out of music altogether after her father’s death in 1980. Janelle Monáe called her, “one of the godmothers of redefining how black women in music can be viewed.”