Betty Davis, who released three classic funk albums in the '70s then left music behind, dies at 77.
As a young girl, country singer Mickey Guyton felt ‘proud to be an American’ after hearing Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’author and critic Hanif Abdurraqib on Twitter. “You’ve heard her, even if you think you’ve never heard her. I’m glad we got her at all.” Davis’ work earned a second life through samples on records by artists including Method Man, Ice Cube and Redman.
Betty stopped recording music altogether after releasing her third album, “Nasty Girl,” in 1975. Retiring from the business Greta Garbo-style, she shuttered herself from the public until a mid-2000s groundswell of writers and fans began touting her work anew. She met Davis while he was was also involved with Cecily Tyson — and not yet divorced from his first wife, Frances Taylor Davis. Though Miles was twice Betty’s age, the connection was quick. “She was just ahead of her time,” Miles wrote in his autobiography. “She also helped me change the way I was dressing. The marriage only lasted about a year, but that year was full of new things and surprises and helped point the way I was to go, both in my music and, in some ways, my lifestyle.
“I believe in being taken seriously, not coasting on my husband’s name,” she said in a 1974 press release. Referring to two record moguls, she continued, “I could always have recorded with Clive [Davis] or Ahmet [Ertegun] but I would never truly know if I were being humored because I was Miles’ wife.”
“If you scanned the credits on her albums you realized that Betty wasn’t merely a mouthpiece for a male producer or songwriter but an artist in her own right, an independent visionary in an era where black female solo artists were a rarity,” wrote soul scholar and author Oliver Wang in the liner notes to Light in the Attic’s 2007 reissue of “Betty Davis.
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