Betty Mabry, who recorded three albums that wrote music history as Betty Davis in the early 1970s, has died. To situate the Dimension with a more familiar name, Prince once played her music to a journalist during an interview and said, “This is where we’re going.” Madonna, Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe also named her as a role model.
She brought the new family name with her from a brief marriage to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, which was much more important to him than to her. Davis fell in love with her in 1968 while she was in New York demonstrating how a woman can shake up pop culture. She worked as a model and club manager, studied fashion and acting, recorded soul singles.
She grew up on her grandmother’s pig farm in North Carolina. Her father worked in the steel mill. She lived in Pittsburgh for a while as a teenager, but then moved to New York when she was 17. There she hung out in the club The Cellar, met Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. She had pursued her true calling as a singer and songwriter from an early age. She wrote the song “Uptown” for the Chambers Brothers, which she gave them until they finally recorded it and landed their biggest hit with it.
She actually wanted to work with Carlos Santana in California, but then preferred to produce herself
At the Blue Note she then met Miles Davis, who, like so many jazz musicians, was struggling with the youth migrating to rock and funk. First she gave him a new wardrobe with lots of leather, scarves and platform shoes. She stuffed the garbage cans with his suits, she later said. She also introduced him to Hendrix and Stone. Under the influence of his new wife and her friends, Davis then recorded the album “Bitches Brew”, on which his musicians experiment with electric guitars and keyboards. His music was never the same after that.
Betty Davis says about her music: “I put everything in it.”
(Photo: Robert Brenner)
Betty Davis was so annoyed by her husband’s affectations that she left him after a year. She modeled in London for a while, although it bored her. “You don’t need a brain for that,” she said later. “And you can only do that as long as you look good.” A year later she returned, moved to California. She actually wanted to work there with Carlos Santana. But then she preferred to produce herself and recorded her three legendary albums “Betty Davis”, “They Say I’m Different” and “Nasty Gal” between 1973 and 1975 with an unusually rough funk. She was way ahead of her time with a raspy voice that treated her like a hard rock guitar, lyrics about promiscuity and S&M, an aggressive sexuality that she staged with a wide-leggedness that rivaled the male rock stars of the time, with their extravagant fashion and their monumental self-confidence. They didn’t play their records on the radio, which at the time also meant that they never made the charts and Davis hardly made any money from their music.
For a long time it was puzzled why she withdrew so radically
In 1979 she retired to a monastery in Japan. Her fourth album “Is It Love or Desire” was already finished, but it wasn’t released until thirty years later. A year later she moved back to Pittsburgh and disappeared from public view. She sometimes said her father’s death changed everything. But you didn’t really believe her. The aggressive funk diva had turned into a taciturn, enraptured melancholic. For a long time it was puzzled why she withdrew so radically. Even the 2017 documentary “Betty: They Say I’m Different” couldn’t clarify that, for which she talked a lot, answered few questions and didn’t show herself, which only increased her myth. She says: “I never told anyone that Miles was violent. So I wrote and sang my heart out. Three albums of heavy funk. I packed everything in. But the doors in the industry kept closing. Always again white men behind desks told me to change – my looks, my sound. I had to ‘fit in’ or there would be no contract. I learned that stars starve in silence.”
On Wednesday, Betty Davis died at home in suburban Pittsburgh, reportedly of natural causes. She was 76 years old.