Background
Born Betty Mabry in 1945, Betty Davis grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and just outside of Pittsburgh. On her grandmother’s farm in Reidsville, North Carolina, she listened to B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and Elmore James and other blues musicians. On of the first song she wrote, at the age of twelve, was a ditty called “I’m Going to Bake That Cake of Love.”
At the age of 16, she left Pittsburgh for New York City, enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Technology while living with her aunt. She soaked up the Greenwich Village culture and folk music of the early 1960s. Davis associated herself with frequenters of the Cellar, a hip uptown club where young and stylish people congregated. It was a multiracial, artsy crowd of models, design students, actors, and singers. At the Cellar she played records and chatted people up. She also worked as a model, appearing in photo spreads in Seventeen, Ebony and Glamour.
In her time in New York, she met several musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Yet the seeds of Davis’ musical career were planted through her friendship with soul singer Lou Courtney, who produced her first single, “The Cellar” with simple, catchy lyrics like, “Where you going fellas, so fly? / I’m going to the Cellar, my oh my / What you going to do there / We’re going to boogaloo there.”
The single was a local jam for the Cellar. Yet Davis’ first professional gig wasn’t until she wrote “Uptown (to Harlem)” for the Chambers Brothers. Their 1967 album was a major success, but Davis was focusing on her modeling career. She was successful as a model but felt bored by the work. According to Oliver Wang’s They Say I’m Different liner notes, Davis says, “I didn’t like modeling because you didn’t need brains to do it. It’s only going to last as long as you look good.”
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