Betty Davis, an unsung funk pioneer, dies at 77

Betty Davis, a commercially unsuccessful but immensely influential soul, funk, and R&B singer, died today of natural causes, a representative confirmed in an email to The FADER.

Born Betty Mabry in Durham, North Carolina, she moved to New York in the early '60s to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Immersing herself in the parallel worlds of downtown folk and uptown funk, she was introduced to the music industry by artists — Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Lou Courtney — whom she met at Harlem clubs like The Cellar. She released her first official single, "Get Ready For Betty" b/w "I'm Gonna Get My Baby Back" as Betty Mabry in 1964.

Betty met Miles Davis in 1966 and married him in 1968, when she was 23 and he was 42. Their marriage only lasted a year — Miles accused her of cheating on him with Hendrix, which she denied — and she's thought to have been the inspiration for the title of his seminal 1970 fusion album, Bitches Brew, released shortly after their divorce.

For the next six years, she recorded as Betty Davis, releasing her self-titled debut album in 1973, They Say I'm Different in 1974, and Nasty Gal in 1975. She finished one more LP, Is It Love or Desire?, scheduled for 1976. But it was shelved, due in part to the fact that her music was blacklisted from the radio by after boycots by religious groups and the NAACP, who took issue with her overtly sexual lyrics and aggressively raunchy performance style. After that, she moved to Pittsburgh and retired from music entirely. "When I was told it was over, I just accepted it," she said in a 2018 interview with The New York Times.

Davis' unapolagetic sexuality may have prevented her from achieving commercial success, but it inspired some of the most important artists of the next half-century to break free from the industry's respectability standards. Prince and Madonna were directly emboldened by Davis' free spirit, and contemporary neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, and Jamila Woods have cited her as an influence.

In the late aughts, Light in the Attic Records reissued all three of Davis' studio albums and put out her previously unreleased fourth record for the world to hear. In 2016, the label released a compilation of her early work titled The Columbia Years, 1968–1969. Betty: They Say I'm Different, a documentary on Davis' life, premiered the next year. And in 2019, she penned "A Little BIt Hot Tonight," her first single in over 40 years, with Danielle Maggio performing in her place.