Betty Davis, the Durham-born funk singer who was ‘Madonna before Madonna,’ dies at 76
Betty Davis, the Durham-born siren of funk and onetime wife of jazz legend Miles Davis who kicked down music industry doors with a raw, sexualized sound giving voice to Black women, has died.
She was 76.
“Davis herself was the unquestioned mastermind with a jagged, switchblade rasp of a voice unlike any other in funk,” wrote former News & Observer music critic David Menconi in his North Carolina music history “Step It Up and Go.” “She blazed a trail in the early 1970s with a series of pre-disco funk masterpieces.”
Born Betty Mabry, Davis came from a segregated North Carolina where her father labored in mills.
In the 2017 documentary “They Say I’m Different,” she spoke of inspiration that drew her to Howlin’ Wolf and Bessie Smith records, then to write her first song, “Bake a Cake of Love,” at 12.
“There’s always been a bird inside me,” she says in the movie. “It used to sit outside my window when I was a girl, me feeding the hogs across the cornfield. Then, that little bird was orange and bright, but it grew into a crow. Black crow. ... That’s how it all began. The beginning of being different.”
Davis’ family moved to Pittsburgh while she was still young, and she would move to New York in her early 20s, writing “Uptown to Harlem” for the Chambers Brothers, who took the song on the spot.
‘I dug those shoes’
While there she met Miles Davis at the Blue Note jazz club, where she told filmmakers, “I didn’t care much for his jazz, but when I saw those shoes, I dug those shoes.”
He called her, “Madonna before Madonna. Prince before Prince.”
The jazz trumpeter, then 40 and losing his audience to the more electrified and politically charged music of the 1960s, followed Betty Davis’ lead. She had already befriended Jimi Hendrix, and under her influence, Miles Davis would adopt his electric fusion style and updated wardrobe, complete with turquoise leather and platform shoes.
“I filled the trash with his suits,” she told the documentary crew.
Their marriage would be short-lived, punctuated by the trumpeter’s violent temper. But Davis’ own career would follow.
In the early 70s, she would release “Nasty Gal” and “If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up,” performing in hot pants and knee-high boots — a soul enchantress worlds apart from the polished Motown singers who preceded her.
But before disappearing from the music scene, reclusive and obscure, she spoke of the frustrations that came from an unwillingness to fit in.
“Always white men behind desks,” she said in the film, “telling me to change.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2022 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Betty Davis, the Durham-born funk singer who was ‘Madonna before Madonna,’ dies at 76."