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Rediscovering Betty Davis

Independent film on her life sparks a renewed interest

By Keith L. Alexander, The Washington Post
Published: September 15, 2018, 5:12am

Betty Davis sits in her modest apartment, heating up a leftover vegetarian Indian meal ordered from a nearby restaurant a day earlier.

As she makes her way into the living room, there is a spiral notebook and a tape recorder next to her, both used, she says, to write and record her songs and tunes.

Nearly 40 years ago, millions of people knew Davis’ songs when she was a funk icon, known for her sexy persona and her marriage to Miles Davis. Since the late 1980s, Davis has lived a quiet, unassuming life outside Pittsburgh, where most people don’t recognize her when she shops at the local Giant Eagle supermarket.

In the past few months, however, interest in Davis and her whereabouts has surfaced thanks to an independent documentary on her life titled “Betty: They Say I’m Different.”

The film has brought renewed attention to the elusive 74-year-old Davis, who was hailed as the queen of funk in the early 1970s but who mysteriously disappeared from public life in the ’80s. The documentary’s release brings publicity she has avoided for decades. Still, there’s been some positive aspects, including a phone call from singer Erykah Badu, who talked about her at a recent New York music festival where the movie was shown.

“I’m very excited because it’s being shown in all of these different countries and will be going to Johannesburg, South Africa,” Davis says.

“It feels very good. I’m really surprised myself that this is happening on this level,” she says.

Davis lives in a one-bedroom apartment for senior women run by Catholic Charities, and she is looked after by a select group of her childhood friends. “I didn’t just fade off the planet. I just started living a quiet life back here. I just decided that period of my life had changed,” she says.

The film’s London-based director Phil Cox calls Betty Davis “the Greta Garbo” of the music industry because the reclusive Davis shuns interviews and photographers, preferring to be left alone. Cox was told about her in 2012 after he had produced a film that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival and was looking for another subject. He became enthralled with the story of her short-lived fame and mysterious disappearance.

When Cox finally met Davis four years ago, he was surprised by the way she was living. At the time, she was staying in the basement of a house. No internet. No cellphone. No car.

“This wasn’t a woman with riches or luxury. She was living on the bare essentials,” he remembers.

Davis influenced a generation of artists including Macy Gray and Janelle Monae. Her songs have been sampled by numerous modern artists, including rappers Ice Cube and Method Man and rocker Lenny Kravitz.

“Betty calls herself a projector, not a singer. She was not an Aretha. It was an unusual voice. She couldn’t be pigeonholed,” Cox says.

Her voice was raspy, not stylistic of many of the successful black female singers of the early 1970s such as Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross or Dionne Warwick. And unlike Tina Turner, who had husband Ike on songs and on stage with her as her “archetype beside her,” Betty was a solo artist singing about her sexual prowess when she began recording her own music after her divorce from Miles, Cox says.

Grammy-winning singer Gray grew up listening to Davis’ music as a child in the 1970s when her mother played it in their home in Canton, Ohio. Gray remembers the raspy voice, the Afro, the thigh-high boots and in-your-face attitude.

“She had this badass, Foxy Brown vibe about her. She was the kind of girl that you want to be when you grow up,” Gray says.

Davis influenced Gray musically, vocally and spiritually. “She seemed sure, free, bold and unafraid at a time when women and black people were supposed to feel afraid or limited. And then Betty Davis comes along and rose above that on her own. She presented herself as someone who wasn’t captive by all that. She seemed to fly and skip right over that and do her thing the way she wanted to do,” Gray says.

The beginning

Davis was born in Durham, N.C., but moved to Homestead, Pa., when she was in kindergarten. Like many black families who migrated from the South to Pittsburgh, including my grandfather, Davis’ father got a job in the steel mill.

After graduating from high school at 17, Betty Davis took a Greyhound bus to New York, where she enrolled in the city’s Fashion Institute of Technology. There, the 5-foot-7-inch Davis worked as a runway and magazine model, all the while writing songs.

“I started writing music when I was 12 years old. I used to drive the neighbors crazy, because I would be singing from my mother’s kitchen all the time,” she says. “I would put music to lyrics that I wrote. It’s a gift.”

In 1966, Davis went to a Greenwich Village club, where she saw a jazz trumpeter playing.

“I went to a dance concert, and I saw this great-looking guy in this suit. I thought he was fantastic-looking. I contacted a photographer I knew and told him about this guy. My friend said it sounded like Miles Davis. I had no idea who he was,” she says with a laugh.

At another club days later, she ran into Davis again. This time, she says, he sent one of his employees over to ask her out for a drink during one of the breaks of his set.

The two dated for two years. They were married in 1968 when he was 42. She was 24.

“I learned a lot musically. I always said to Miles, ‘I should have been born your daughter.’ Because our relationship was very enlightening as far as my music was concerned. He played a lot of classical music. I used to listen to Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. That broadened my horizon as far as music was concerned,” she says. And she introduced him to musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone.

It was a brief but challenging relationship. In his 1989 autobiography, Miles Davis wrote about Betty.

Sexual confidence

Decades before Vanity 6, Janet Jackson and Beyonce bragged about being nasty, Davis broadly projected her sexual confidence in 1975 with her tune “Nasty Gal.” The album cover featured Betty wearing a negligee, lying down with her legs open.

“You used to love it when I’d scratch your back, baby. I used to love it when you did it. When ya did it to me real good,” she screamed through her gravely alto, reminiscent of a Janis Joplin or Millie Jackson.

Dyana Williams was a popular radio disc jockey at WHUR-96.3 FM, Howard University’s radio station, from 1973 to 1975. Her on-air name was Ebony Moonbeams. Davis’ music was on constant rotation at a time when go-go music was rising in popularity in D.C., says Williams.

“It was the go-go capital. And folks who loved go-go understood her version of funk, R&B, soul and rock,” Williams says. “Considering what was going on at that time musically with Sly, Jimi Hendrix, all the bands, funk was big at that time, in my opinion. Betty was the first woman to merge those genres successfully. She was a funk-rock artist. She was THE funk-rock artist.”

As the documentary details, Davis often fought with record executives, most of whom were white men who tried to force Davis to perform a certain way. And although she had a large audience, the NAACP issued boycotts of black radio stations around the country that played her music, arguing that Davis and her lyrics were not positive role models for black America at the time.

“I thought they were for the advancement of colored people, correct? But they were stopping my advancement. They were stopping me from making a living,” Davis says.

“I wrote songs about sex, and that was sort of unheard of then. So that’s what I think my influence was. It was very sexually oriented.”

Her independence, Cox says, is what ultimately led to the end of her career after battling with record executives.

“Betty dug her own hole. She refused to compromise or change,” he says. “Betty admits she destroyed her own career, by her own sheer will. She’s very warm and beautiful. But when Betty says something, she will not change.”

By the late 1970s, her label, Island Records, dropped her, and Davis was unable to secure another backer. Then in 1980, Davis’ father died while she was living out of the country. Davis moved back to Homestead to live with her mother.

Cox and others who know Davis say the death of Davis’ father was something she struggled to overcome.

“Betty struggled with mental illness but didn’t want to talk about it,” Cox says. “Mental illness was there, yet she forged her own way out of it.”

Davis acknowledges that she had a “setback” after her father’s death. “That was about it,” Davis says.

Today, the Afro and thigh-high boots are gone. She wears “comfortable” shoes and keeps her salt-and-pepper hair simply combed. Davis says she was just doing the music she believed in, but that was a different time, she says, and now she is focusing on her “quiet life.”

“I like that nobody knows who I am when they see me. I like to live quietly,” she says “But it would be nice to be remembered that at one time, she made good music and she made people smile.”

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