Betty Davis

Essential Albums

  • They Say I'm Different
    They Say I'm Different

    You could call the funk singer Betty Davis a precursor of Madonna, or of Lil’ Kim. You could call her a product of her time, or an echo of blues singers like Big Mama Thornton and Bessie Smith. You could call her crass, or you could just call her observant. Generally, you’d be right. It’s easy to see why her 1974 album—her second—got lost when it came out: There was nothing to compare it to, and nothing in the music itself to make a mainstream argument—it’s too raw, not in the avant-garde sense, but in the sense you might apply to punk a few years later. The pleasure isn’t just in her frankness (“Don’t Call Her No Tramp”: “You can call her stupid/And superficial… but don’t you call her no tramp”) or sense of humor (it’s possible the words “I used to beat him with a turquoise chain, yeah!” had never been spoken before, let alone recorded), but in recognizing the dots she connected and ground she laid for later artists—female, especially. She reportedly once turned down Eric Clapton (a partner, briefly) to produce her because she thought his music was too conservative, and by 1974, was producing herself. In the wake of her death in 2022, Erykah Badu commented that we are all grains of sand in her Bettyness—a testament to an artist whose legacy was still shaking out.

Albums

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About Betty Davis

Funk vocalist, songwriter, and producer Betty Davis was artistic and sexual liberation personified. Uncompromising, unfiltered, and ahead of its time, her small body of work consequently made little commercial impact but gradually found a wider audience. She released her first recordings as Betty Mabry in 1964, had a profound effect on Miles Davis -- to whom she was briefly married -- and is known most for her progressive left-field funk albums issued the following decade, namely her self-titled debut and the charting (and fittingly titled) They Say I'm Different and Nasty Gal. So unbothered by mainstream acceptance was Davis that much of her studio work remained unreleased until decades after the fact. Well before her death in 2022, Davis became an enduring influence heard in the output of artists ranging from Millie Jackson to Prince, from Macy Gray to Beyoncé, and from R&B balladeers to hardcore rappers.

HOMETOWN
Durham, NC, United States
BORN
July 26, 1944
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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