Betty Davis – If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up

17th August 2021 · 1970s, 1973, Funk, Music, Soul

Betty Davis is the missing link between Tina Turner and Millie Jackson, her raw sex appeal proving too much for America in the early 1970s.

With a grinding guitar riff, swirling organ runs, a firmly funky backbone and a vocal that could strip wallpaper, this song is as unforgettable as its title, and its lyric.

“I started wiggling my fanny,” sings Betty, painting a picture of her showstopping arrival in a nightclub, as a bloke in the background mops his fevered brow. “I’m crazy, I’m wild, and I’m nasty,” she declares. “Try not to pass out… Take me home baby please.”

It’s no disrespect to Betty Davis to say her musical career was overshadowed by that of her husband. It’s also true that she influenced his work in ways that went far beyond being married to a jazz legend.

A wildly flamboyant funk diva who was also a successful model, Betty Mabry combined the gritty emotion of Tina Turner, the futurist fashion sense of David Bowie and the trendsetting flair of Miles Davis, her husband for a year.

It was Betty who turned Miles on to groovy fashions and psychedelic rock after introducing him to her friends Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone – the spark that lit the musical reinvention that produced Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way.

Her own first single had been released in 1964 after she moved to New York and began studying fashion, working in clubs, and hanging out in Greenwich Village, becoming a successful cover girl.

Before she had turned 20 she wrote Uptown (To Harlem) for The Chambers Brothers and was dating Hugh Masakela before she met Miles, marrying him in 1968 when she was 23 and he was 42.

They divorced a year later, Miles explaining that she was simply “too young and wild” – she always denied his suspicion of an affair with Hendrix – and she moved to London to work as a model again, returning to America.

Her self-titled debut album came out in 1973, backed by a host of great musicians from the Family Stone, Santana, Tower Of Power and The Pointer Sisters. This was the opening track, a minor R&B hit, though neither that first album, nor two more, was a commercial success.

Her career was hampered by censorship: Betty oozed so much sex appeal in concert (and on record) with her primal grunts and howls, and X-certificate moans and murmurs, that religious groups protested many of her concerts and she was effectively boycotted by radio stations and TV. She retired in 1979.