"Black Diamond Woman" Betty Davis -- funk singer, songwriter, model and fashion icon -- was born Betty Gray Mabry on July 26, 1945, in Durham, North Carolina. On her Reidsville farm in Rockingham County, Mabry's grandmother Beulah Blackwell sparked her interest in music -- there Mabry met a number of blues musicians. After a teenage move to Pennsylvania, Mabry moved to New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and make the burgeoning Greenwich Village scene in the city. Working as a successful model, Mabry wrote her first published song for the Chambers Brothers, "Uptown," in 1967. In '68, she met and married Miles Davis, taking his surname, upping his clothing game, and more importantly convincing him of the importance of rock and funk via Hendrix and Sly Stone. She is the cover model of the last album of Miles Davis's "second great quintet," Filles de Kilimanjaro, and inspired its last song "Mademoiselle Mabry." All fitting, as she catalyzed his turn to electric funk rock in the coming years.
But Betty Davis was no blushing muse -- in fact, Miles Davis, claimed his then wife was "too wild" for him. Whatever the validity of Miles Davis's claim, Betty Davis's music certainly was and is "wild." On albums like Betty Davis, They Say I'm Different, Nasty Gal, and her only recently released archival The Columbia Years, Davis purrs, drawls and hisses over jazzy funk rock rhythms. This music was overlooked at the time, perhaps written off as a vanity project by "Miles Davis's ex-wife." But since their revival and rediscovery in the 2000s, this music has rightly taken its place alongside other adventurous jazz-inflected funk projects with vocalists unafraid to experiment with the primal, guttural, and forward, by the likes of Annette Peacock and Yoko Ono, not to mention Sly Stone. The lyrics are at turns confrontational, seductive, and outlandish in their claims, proving Betty Davis's music to be ahead of its time.