Betty Davis has long been a legend, that “voodoo chile” that her friend Jimi Hendrix sang about, even when very few folks knew her name. Riding a multicoloured wave of blaring guitars, booming bass and heavy drums, the singer-songwriter made Black magic music that straddled genres (rock, funk, soul and blues) while also contributing a beyond compare voice to the soundscape. On wild-styled songs “If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up”, “Nasty Gal” and “He Was a Big Freak”, she wailed, screamed, screeched and roared provocative lyrics that detailed one-night stands, sexual liberation and S&M loving men who didn’t mind being beaten with a turquoise chain. Though there were a few other rocking Black women on the scene during Betty Davis’s brief run as an album making artist from 1973–75 – namely LaBelle and Chaka Khan – Davis was rawer, raunchier and rhythmically on a different level.

“In Betty’s music, you can hear the passion and artistry as well as the complexity and discipline,” singer-songwriter Joi Gilliam told me in a 2015 interview for an online feature on Davis. In 1996, Gilliam covered “If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up” on her brilliant, but unreleased Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome. “Most of all there is also a sense of freedom. Prior to hearing her, the only people I felt kindred to in that way was Minnie Riperton, LaBelle and Sade, but Betty Davis was the missing link. Listening to her voice, I felt as though I’d been adopted, but now I had found my natural soul mama.”

It wasn't until over a decade later, in 2007, that reissue champs Light In The Attic made Davis’s small catalogue available to the public, renewing interest in her personal brand of Black music that still sounds as cutting edge as it did damn near 50 years ago.

The 77 years old former performer Betty Davis died on 9 February in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Though she hadn’t recorded or performed since falling out with the industry at the end of the 1970s, when she retreated from the public eye and returned to Pennsylvania, she still had a cult following that continued to grow steadily. In 2017 the documentary Betty – They Say I’m Different, named after her second disc, was released to critical acclaim. That same year, her chapter in the HBO musical animated series Tales From The Tour Bus aired, and featured friends, collaborators and soul scholars Nelson George, Greg Tate and Vernon Gibbs riffing about her history and legacy.

Once married to Miles Davis, who was 18 years her senior, Betty, whose maiden name was Mabry, had moved to New York City from Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s to become a student and fashion model. Davis was also a lyricist who had started penning songs while still a teenager and began her music career as the songwriter behind The Chambers Brothers’ 1967 “Uptown” single. She later wrote some funky songs that Lionel Richie's then group The Commodores recorded for the demo that got them signed to Motown. Yet, when Berry Gordy told her she’d have to sell her publishing as well, she took the songs back and decided to record them herself.

Having hooked up with Miles in 1968 after they met at New York City’s Village Gate jazz club, she soon broke up his relationship with actress Cicely Tyson. Within months they were married, with Betty introducing the custom suit wearing bebopper to elements of the new cool culture that included the music of her friend Hendrix and post-hippie Greenwich Village fashions. Inspired, he flipped both his sartorial and sonic sensibility as though he’d been electrified.

Miles knew well his wife’s musical talent and worked with her on some demos that can be heard on The Columbia Years 1968–69 (Light In The Attic, 2016). He produced her, alongside Teo Macero, but he wasn’t keen on Betty becoming famous in fear that she’d leave him. The couple lasted until 1971 when Betty left because of Miles’s violent temper and abusive ways. Fleeing to London to recover, she modelled and hung out on the post-swinging streets of the capital, before returning to the US in 1972.

Though there were loose plans for her to work with Carlos Santana, it never happened. Turned on by the sheer electric zap of her style, I went on a search for Betty Davis’s long out of print albums. In those pre-internet days, I dug through the crates at various secondhand and collectable stores, places where no one had heard of her, before I finally found her stunning self-titled album from 1973.

Produced by former Sly & The Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, the album was recorded in three weeks at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. Caught between hard rock and a funky place, that first album, which is my personal favourite, was recorded in the Bay Area with a crew that included Larry Graham on bass and the then unknown Pointer Sisters and Sylvester singing back-up. It set the aural stage for her brief career with tracks that included the aforementioned “If I’m Lucky I Just Might Get Picked Up”, “Anti-Love Song” and “Steppin' In Her I Miller Shoes”.

Years later, Errico remembered their brief time together as something special. “I met Betty through Michael Carabello, who was a conga player in the original Santana band,” Errico told writer J-Zone in 2019. “He was going out with her at the time, and we were working on a project, Michael and I. So he kept saying, ‘Hey, Betty wants to meet you.’ And we were in the studio one day and he said, ‘She’s in town.’ So he asked if he could bring her by and I said, yeah, bring her by. And by the end of that day, she had asked me to produce her record. It was really a very cool record. And again, that was one of those records that weren’t necessarily commercially successful, but it still lives this day, as we sit here and speak, around the world.”

A year after Davis’s 1973 debut, she released They Say I’m Different (1974). On that project Davis took over as producer. Though not as studio savvy as Errico, she was no slouch behind the board. “It’s just raw…R-A-W,” is how she described her music on Al Gee's Rap N' Rhythm show in 1974. A year later she told journalist Robin Katz from Sounds, "I record on pure energy. I record at a level of intensity that, from what I hear, people don't record.”

But sales were low and Davis eventually left Just Sunshine Records for the mighty music machine that was Island Records, after being wooed by owner Chris Blackwell. Though Blackwell thought he’d make her as popular as Donna Summer or her other contemporaries, when Nasty Gal (1975) was released it too did poorly. Coming out at a time when almost every Black woman singer except Tina Turner was still wearing supper club approved sequinned dresses, Betty Davis opted to be as raunchy as she wanted to be.

Her image on the covers was startling, a contrast to pictures of the soul women of that era that I’d seen in magazines over the years. On the Betty Davis album jacket she posed with her sky-high Afro, hot pants and thigh high silver boots, while on Nasty Gal she was clad in a negligee, fishnets and heels. Still, Betty’s liberation wasn’t for everyone, and more than a few thought, as critic Joe McEwen echoed in 1975, that she was “a shade too brazen and harsh for wider acceptance”.

Island thought that was precisely the problem and tried to persuade Davis to change. When she refused to budge, the Blackwell posse literally abandoned Betty when she was in the studio recording her fourth disc in 1976. Refusing to pay the studio fees, the album stayed in limbo for decades and wasn’t released until 2009 under the title Is It Love Or Desire.

Betty Davis didn’t die in vain or unknown. Her work has been cited by Prince, Santana and George Clinton. Listen closely to her music and you can hear what inspired Macy Gray, Janelle Monáe and New York City based singer Nucomme.

Though Betty’s image was obviously important, in the end it was the music that mattered most: forward thinking material that still sounds fresh.

For more articles and videos check out “A Betty Davis Syllabus”, compiled by New York University professor De Angela L Duff.

Wire subscribers can read Neil Kulkarni's review of Betty Davis – They Say I'm Different in The Wire 409 and Michael A Gonzales’s review of The Columbia Years 1968-1969 in The Wire 391 via our digital archive.