Although she has never experienced public success, the septuagenarian, a former wife of Miles Davis, has had a lot of influence on American black music.
Le Monde
The musician Betty Davis, precursor of the funk and inspiring for generations of artists despite a short career, died Wednesday, February 9 to 77 years.
“It is with great sadness that I share the news of the death of Betty Davis, a musical influencer with the many talents and pioneers of the rock, singer, songwriter and figure figure”, announced a long friend Date of Ms. Davis, Constance Portis, on the artist’s website. AMIE DOWNS, Director of the Communication of the County of Allegheny (in Pennsylvania, where she lived), added that the causes of his death were natural.
The second wife of the Jazz Miles Davis legend was a pillar of the New York music scene of the 1960s and 1970s, and recorded almost all of his music between 1964 and 1976, with albums like Betty Davis and they say ( reissued in 2007 by The LIGHT IN THE ATTIC LABEL ). She had a great success for her lyricism at sexual references, giving the tone, later to legends like Prince, Madonna or Erykah Badu.
A “godmother”
If their marriage lasted one year (between 1968 and 1969), it was in Betty Davis, born Mabry, which we attribute the merit of having made the trumpet player the rock of the time, through Jimi Hendrix, and paved the way for his fusion phase, which gave birth to Bitches Brew album in 1970.
Betty Davis also wrote the song Uptown (to Harlem) in 1967 for Chambers Brothers, rediscovered in the Summer of Soul documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a film of the musician Questlove named at Oscars 2022 . Rappers like Ice Cube and Talib Kweli have sampled the work of Betty Davis, whose music has not been commercial success but has inspired artists for decades. For Soul Janelle Monae’s artist, she is one of the “godmother” behind “the redefinition of how black women in music can be perceived”.
At the end of the 1970s, after three years without publishing album, and a year in Japan with monks, Davis brutally left the music industry to settle near Pittsburgh, where she passed the Four decades following without producing the slightest song. “When I was told it was over, I just accepted it, she said to the New York Times in a rare interview in 2008 and no one did not hit my door. “