It was easier just to call Betty Davis strange and profane than to contend with her music holding up a mirror to highlight how dismissively and recklessly Black women are treated.
Photo: Gilles Petard/Redferns
We’ve only ever seen about a minute’s worth of footage of Betty Davis’s live show. The model, musician, and muse, who passed away at 77 last week, married a visionary sense of style to wide-ranging musical tastes and connections, bridging universes of jazz, funk, rock, and soul and expanding the horizons of the men in her orbit. But Davis’s catalogue is frustratingly slight, mostly captured in a string of early-’70s albums that weren’t well received in spite of their general excellence and innovation….
