“They Say I’m Different” by BETTY DAVIS

Betty Davis, who was called vulgar in her day and a mystery after it, died on February 9th at age 77.

And that's why you think I'm strange

The forlorn hope was the first wave of soldiers up the ladders in a castle siege, or in the wars fought by sword and musket, the vanguard that attacked a breach in the defenses. It was accepted that few would survive; later their praises would be sung. Betty Davis broke through entrenched ideas of what women could do or say in music, then vanished from the business altogether. Those who followed the path she cut called her brave. Miles Davis would later say that his ex-wife was “Madonna before Madonna; Prince before Prince.”

Betty Mabrey was a little girl walking across the cornfield on the farm in North Carolina when she first heard the voice inside her that spoke to being different, which she called the “little bird,” and when the voice grew larger and darker, she came to know if as it The Crow. It was at Birdland in New York where she met Miles Davis. By then, she had studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was modeling for the money; she was a songwriter whose “Uptown” was recorded by The Chambers Brothers after she sang it for them on the street; and she was friends with Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix, she said, knew The Crow.

Betty didn’t care for Miles’s jazz that night but very much liked his shoes, which is what she told him. They started dating in early 1968; by September, her portrait was on the cover of Miles’s Filles de Kilimanjaro, and the two were married in a union that would last about a year¹. Miles before Betty was inching toward fusion with his second great quintet² while wearing Italian suits³, his shirts fastidiously tailored so that a perfect inch and a half of cuff would show when he held his hands up to play his trumpet. After Betty, he adorned himself in counterculture style and hid behind alien-eye shades; after Betty came Bitches Brew⁴. After Miles, Betty moved to London to model, then the Bay Area, where she let The Crow sing. 

“They Say I’m Different” is from Betty’s 1974 self-produced second album of the same name. Her first, self titled, was produced by Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico and featured Larry Graham on bass, Neil Schon (of Santana and later Journey) on guitar, plus backing vocals by the Pointer Sisters and Sylvester⁵ — all pros who knew how to put a gloss on the funk. They Say I’m Different was recorded with a band she formed, and its gritty funk-rock is a closer approximation of her onstage persona, which shocked even seen-it-all downtown New York audiences as she stalked the stage in silver lamé hot pants and halter top, thrusting her crotch toward the audience like, well, a rock star. An interviewer at the time asked to describe her music. Her answer: “raw.”

Betty Davis’s funk-rock wasn’t a simple amalgamation of genres. Where often the sound can be just one style stitched onto the other — especially in how so much of ‘90s funk-rock just put an applique of thumb-slap bass over heavy, distorted guitar — there’s no way to separate her music into component parts. It’s funk-rock because it’s funky as hell and rocks as hard as anything. The sound will make you want to move your butt but also feel like you better watch your ass.

They say I'm different 'cause I'm a piece of sugar cane

Sweet to the core that's why I got rhythm

My Great Grandma didn't like the foxtrot

Now instead she spitted snuff and boogied to Elmore James

Spit on

The groove of “They Say I’m Different” is laid down by Headhunters’ drummer Mike Clark. The hiss of his open high-hat is matched by the snarl of Cordell Dudley’s gutbucket guitar. It’s a fierce, uncompromising track. She wails out lyrics that rattle off the names of blues artists that connect her music back to what her grandparents danced to back on the farm: Big Mama Thornton, Elmore James, Howlin Wolf, Lightning Hopkins, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Son House, Freddie King, and “Bessie Smith, oh hey hey.” It’s more than a tribute. It’s Betty Davis’s explanation for why “they say I’m different.” The music didn’t make her different; plenty of completely ordinary people grew up with it. The connection she makes is that this music spoke to the difference she felt inside her — the little bird, The Crow. She didn’t just hear the blues, she heard the freedom in it.

What was called raunchy in Betty Davis’s day would be considered sex-positive now, which isn’t to downplay how aggressive the frank, overt sexuality of her Nasty Girl persona seemed in the ‘70s. The Velvet Underground had sung about BDSM in “Venus In Furs,” but they were art nerds, an Andy Warhol’s New York thing. In 1973, VU’s Lou Reed got a song about sex work and transgender people on the radio because it was considered merely, as the New York Times put it, a ”ballad of misfits and oddballs.” None of that was as threatening as a beautiful Black woman’s guttural screech, “He was a big freak! I used to beat him with a turquoise⁶ chain, yeah.” (Track two on They Say I’m Different.) It might have been more acceptable if she'd simply been trying to titillate at a time when kink was still considered a punchline, but Betty Davis wasn’t trying to be anyone’s fantasy. She was real, and real in a way that questioned what was permissible. 

Betty Davis had withdrawn from music altogether by the early ‘80s. The narrative from then on has centered on her “mysterious” disappearance. As mysteries go, it’s one that Scooby and the gang could easily solve while leaving time to raid the icebox. Her fourth studio album, despite a crack band including Herbie Hancock, had been shelved. Great musicians wanted to play her songs, but no labels wanted her, at least not the real her. The market had decided that she was too rock for funk, too black for rock, and too extra for everybody. As she sings on “Stars Starve, You Know,” from that initially unreleased fourth album⁷, “Ain’t no business like show business / that’s why we stay broke.” Broke, unwanted – did she quit or did the music business quit on her? Either way, there’s no mystery that requires spelunking into her personal life to solve. As she sang on Nasty Girl’s “Dedicated to the Press,” “Why do they blame me for what I am?” 

What Betty Davis was, was the forlorn hope. Let her praises be sung.

14 Song Playlist

“They Say I’m Different” and more songs from Betty Davis, including her previously unreleased 1976 album and sessions from ‘68 and ‘69 that Miles Davis recorded at Columbia Records.

17 Songs of Betty Davis’s Blues

All the artists Betty Davis namechecks in “They Say I’m Different,” in order. It makes for a solid blues mix. Thanks, Betty.

Thanks and Welcome!

Thanks to the great Clive Thompson for tweeting about “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Hello to those of you who signed up because of that. Welcome! Hopefully you’re cool with the sharp turn from Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson to Betty Davis. Next week’s will be way different from either.

Here’s where I hope you think of that friend who has an eclectic musical sensibility and want to me a solid by sharing this little endeavor.

Thanks, all.

See you next week.

1. Miles petitioned for divorce citing “temperament.” He told Jet Magazine, "I'm just not the kind of cat to be married." Which may be true, but it was also true that Betty left because he hit her.

2. Miles + Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams

3. “Clean as a broke-dick dog,” as he liked to say.

4. The album’s original title was Witches Brew. The final title was Betty’s idea. Her influence on Miles 1970s work was huge and worthy of a few more paragraphs on its own (if not its own essay), but lets give her own music its moment. Besides, he hit her. Fuck that guy.

5. Sylvester would have the 1978 disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” and his backing singers Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes (“Two Tons O’ Fun”) would go on to have a huge hit in “It’s Raining Men” (co-written by David Letterman bandleader Paul Schaffer) as The Weather Girls.

6. There is a turquoise leitmotif in the They Say I’m Different documentary. Betty’s nails are done in turquoise polish; her aunt is wearing turquoise jewelry; the friend who greets the documentary crew at the door with a glass of wine is wearing turquoise jewelry; the drummer in the Funk House reunion wears a turquoise cuff.

7. Light In the Attic records released the 1976 album as Is It Love or Desire in 2009 as part of their reissue of the original Betty Davis studio albums. Bless them.