February 10, 2022 by Tomiiko Baker

The Queen is dead. Trailblazing musician, performer and fashion icon Betty Davis died Feb. 9 in her home of Homestead, PA of natural causes at the age of 77.

I hadn’t heard Davis’ music until it was reissued decades after. It was shocking how good it was. Where had they been hiding her? Compared to the music of the sometimes lascivious, sometimes feminist funk of Laura Lee, Millie Jackson, or James Brown acolytes Vicki Anderson, Lyn Collins and Marva Whitney. But Betty Mabry Davis is in a class of her own. Her coolness transcends them all.

When she met Miles Davis at the age of 22, she’d already cut a couple singles, worked as a model, club promoter (Step-Down Cellar on 90th Street), and written a song for The Chambers Brothers (“Uptown To Harlem” for their landmark 1967 album, Time Has Come Today). During her relationship and marriage to Davis from ’67 to ’69, she introduced him to Jimi Hendrix (Miles was paranoid that she was sleeping with him — perhaps she did but like a true pimp she?ll deny it to her grave), Sly Stone, and made a huge impact on his fashion sense, not to mention appearing on the cover of Filles De Kilimanjaro, which featured a tribute to her in “Mademoiselle Mabry.” While Miles was working on Bitches Brew, Davis cut an album with a dream-team band consisting of Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams from Miles’ band with Miles producing, and Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell. Afraid of Betty’s success, Miles insisted the album be shelved. Now that the misogynist motherfucker is stone cold dead, it’s high time this album is exhumed from the vaults and released.

Betty’s career didn’t really start until she divorced Miles, and her good friend Jimi was dead. In 1970 she recorded eight songs with the Commodores which were shelved, and moved to the UK in 1971. Marc Bolan (T. Rex) helped her out in seeking a recording contract, but she returned to the U.S. and hooked up with Michael Carabello of Santana in San Francisco. Assembling members of Santana (including future Journey member Neil Schon!), Sly & the Family Stone and Tower of Power, Davis recorded a monster of an album for the Just Sunshine label, and introduced the world to her alter ego that’s part ass-kicking Cleopatra Jones, and part wise-cracking pottymouth influenced by Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. She turned the tables on jive-talking pimp characters with lyrics like, “If I’m in luck I might get picked up … I’m fishin’ and I’m trickin’ and you can call it what you want.” And in “Anti Love Song” she sings, “You know, I could make you crawl/And just as hard as I’d fall for you/You know you’d fall for me harder.” More often her voice would jump between shrieks and feral growls that are truly frightening. The band played hard and tight, on an album that would rival anything by Funkadelic. 1974’s They Say I’m Different was even better, with the cover featuring Betty rockin’ an Amazonian space-Egyptian outfit. Every song was a highlight, from the catchy “Shoo-B-Doop And Cop Him” to “He Was A Big Freak,” where Davis tackles S&M, beating her lover with a turquoise chain. On the title track she gives props to early influences, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith and Chuck Berry. Nasty Gal (1975) was just as great, including the powerful kiss-off to the media, “Dedicated To The Press.”

With big stars like MeShell NdegeOcello, Macy Gray, Kelis and Missy Elliot owing so much to Betty Davis’ pioneering work, it’s a shame she hasn’t enjoyed more fame and fortune, though she certainly gets respect from her peers. It looks like things have changed, with the MOJO article, a rumored documentary on women of funk focusing on Davis, and a reissue of her three albums in the 2CD Talkin’ Trash: The Definitive Betty Davis on Aztec Music.