Betty Davis: Flying Her Freak Flag

Nobody put Betty Davis in a corner. If they’d tried, they probably would have had their face torn off.

The artist behind possibly the raunchiest, sweatiest, most lubricious funk albums of the 1970s, she was born Betty Mabry in 1945 and spent her formative years in Pittsburgh and Durham, North Carolina, growing up listening to her grandmother’s blues collection. She started writing songs at the age of 12, and at age 16 she arrived in New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Already a beauty, she quickly made friends and began frequenting both folk and soul clubs. She had no trouble flitting from scene to scene, but was somehow never considered a hanger-on. She worked as a model but also as a DJ at a New York club called the Cellar.

Through the Cellar, she wound up making connections in the music business, and in 1967 she wrote the song “Uptown” for The Chambers Brothers, which was featured on their smash hit LP, The Time Has Come. But also in 1967, Betty Mabry met Miles Davis.

And the time really had come.

You can see Betty on the cover of Miles’ 1968 LP Filles de Kilimanjaro. It’s a striking, shattered-mirror image that indicates the influence she was having on his life. The album features a piece titled “Mademoiselle Mabry.” The couple was married in September 1968. Now Betty Mabry had become Betty Davis.

Miles credited Betty for turning him onto the possibilities of funk and rock by introducing him to the works of artists like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Betty’s influence transformed Miles’ playing, leading him into hitherto-uncharted areas of rhythm and space. The groundbreaking LPs In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew were the result.

Betty Davis, as a muse, had led Miles Davis to create jazz fusion.

But Betty and Miles were too tempestuous as a couple, both too hot-headed to remain together. Miles divorced her in 1969, saying she was “too young and wild” for him. There are those who believe that Miles discovered evidence that Betty had an affair with Jimi Hendrix, but the fact that Miles and Hendrix remained strong friends until Hendrix’s death a year later puts this into doubt.

Betty took off to London and worked as a model for a while, but her heart remained in the music industry. She remained friends with influential people in the business, and wound up in discussions to become a singer for Santana. But when she returned to the USA, she instead decided to go her own way, as she always did, and formed a funk supergroup that included such talents as Neal Schon of Santana and Journey, over half of the band Graham Central Station, members of Tower of Power, and The Pointer Sisters on backing vocals.

What resulted from her first sessions was the LP Betty Davis (1973, Just Sunshine), and it’s the nastiest, dirtiest, most down-low funk that had been released to that point. The first track, “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up” starts the album off as a statement of intent: It’s Betty as sexual predator and willing conquest at the same time, strutting her stuff in a bar and ready to go. Her voice rips out of her like the scream of an attacking puma. "I said I'm wigglin' my fanny, I'm raunchy dancing, I'm-a-doing it doing it/This is my night out."

Betty understood that funk wasn’t just a style of music. She knew that funk meant the sweat of the crowd boogieing for hours in a hot nightclub; she knew that funk meant the scent of bed sheets after rough, passionate sex. She attempted to bring a fiercely female sexual point of view to funk, which previously had dealt with sex by male chest-thumping (James Brown), juvenile scatological humor (Parliament/Funkadelic), or coy flirtation (LaBelle).

This was the era of Women’s Lib and burning bras. This was the era of Billie Jean King and Ms. Magazine. The timing would have looked perfect to a woman of Betty’s frank nature. Everything should have been primed to explode for her.

But Betty was too far ahead for anyone. Her openly sexual attitude was a shocker; shows were boycotted and her songs weren’t played on the radio. Amazingly, given the temper of the times . . . or perhaps because of them, since record labels were still fairly open-minded to artistry over the bottom line, she was able to record and release two more albums of charging, hardcore funk – They Say I’m Different (1974, Just Sunshine) and Nasty Gal (1975, Island Records) – before losing her recording contract. A fourth LP – considered by members of her band to be her best work – was recorded in 1976 but left shelved and unreleased until 2009, when it emerged as Is It Love or Desire? (Light in the Attic)

On that final, unreleased LP, an insight into Betty’s frame of mind can be found. Devoted to the funk until the end, she complained, “Take off that disco and put on some real music, we’re tired of listening to them ricky-ticky sounds / Remember how it used to be in the ‘60s?”

Nobody put Betty in a corner. There was no one who could be blamed for not promoting her music; her label went above and beyond and stuck by her for three LPs when they didn’t have to do so. The marketplace just wasn’t ready for her.

Davis returned to the recording studio for one final session in 1979, but that was it. This strikingly beautiful woman with the soul of a libertine, who had served as muse to the most important jazz artist of the 20^th Century and who had tried to push the boundaries of black music forward by opening a frank sexual dialogue, turned her back on the music industry and retired.

Over time, however, her LPs were cherished by funk devotees, and wound up being rediscovered by hop-hop samplers, and now she is recognized as one of the most forward-thinking and proudly individual women in rock and soul history. She’s the woman who brought the funk of dirty sheets to funk music. 

 And her tunes can still take your face off if you play ‘em loud, like you should.

-- Benjamin Adams