Early Life and Career
Gail Davies was born Patricia Gail Dickerson in Broken Bow, Oklahoma on June 5, 1948. Her father was a popular country singer in the 1940s, performing on The Louisiana Hayride. Although born in the South, Gail grew up in Washington State, where her mother re-married. Her last name was changed when she was adopted by her stepfather, Darby Davies. After graduating from high school, Gail moved to Los Angeles and married a jazz musician. She briefly sang jazz, but quit after they divorced. She was later hired as a session singer at A&M Records, working with artists such as Neil Young and Hoyt Axton. She was able to sit in on a John Lennon session, produced by Phil Spector, and was befriended by singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell. Mitchell's engineer, Henry Lewy, taught Gail how to produce records. She was invited to tour Europe with Frank Zappa's band, but turned the offer down to work with legendary Country artist Roger Miller, making her television debut as his singing partner on The Merv Griffin Show.
Encouraged by her older brother, Ron Davies, (the writer of "It Ain't Easy" for David Bowie and "Long Hard Climb" for Helen Reddy), Gail began writing songs. She moved to Nashville Tennessee in 1976 and signed with EMI Publishing as a staff songwriter. One of her first successful compositions, "Bucket to the South", was a hit for Ava Barber. The song was also recorded by Lynn Anderson and Mitzi Gaynor. However, Davies was determined to prove she was a singer herself. She signed with Lifesong/CBS Records in 1978 and released a self-titled album that scored three Top 20 singles. One of her own compositions, an introspective song entitled "Someone Is Looking For Someone Like You", was the album's highest charting single, reaching No. 7 in Cashbox and No. 11 on the Billboard charts. It has since been recorded in several languages by such internationally known artists as Nana Moskouri, Susan McCann, George Hamilton IV and bluegrass legends, The Country Gentlemen.
Read more about this topic: Gail Davies
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“The trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life.... My life began by flickering out.”
—Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)