Betty Davis is a pseudonym of Betty Mabry (July 16th, 1944 in New York City, NY – February 9th, 2022 in Homestead, Pennsylvania), a funk, rock and soul singer-songwriter. Mabry’s début was as a songwriter, with The Chambers Brothers’s Uptown (1967, Columbia).

When Betty turned sixteen, she moved to New York and met several musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. She met Miles Davis in 1967 and married him in 1968. As he stated in his autobiography, in addition to creating turmoil in his personal life, his wife helped him to explore music by introducing him to psychedelic rock guitarist Hendrix and funk innovator Stone.

Her first album, “Betty Davis”, was released in 1973 and her band included members of Sly and the Family Stone, Graham Central Station, The Pointer Sisters, Tower of Power, and Neil Schon who came from Santana, but went on to form Journey. Davis released two more studio albums: “They Say I’m Different” (1974) and “Nasty Gal” (1975).

Davis remained a cult figure as a singer, due in part to her open sexual attitude, which was controversial for the time and remains so thirty years later. Some of her shows were boycotted and her songs not played on the radio due to pressure by religious groups. With the passage of time her records have become highly regarded by collectors of soul and funk music.