Guy Davis

Guy Davis distinguished himself as a leading proponent of updating rural blues for present-day audiences and ranked among the foremost champions of African-American artistic and cultural traditions in his era, while also earning widespread recognition for his stage work. Born May 12, 1952, in New York City to actors, directors, and activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, he spent his childhood in the city yet regularly heard accounts of Southern rural life that gradually fostered an intense admiration for the music of Blind Willie McTell, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and their peers, prompting him to learn guitar independently. A Buddy Guy concert he attended at age 13 fixed his path as a blues performer, an outcome reinforced when he later absorbed his signature fingerpicking approach from a nine-fingered guitarist met during a Boston-to-New York train ride.

Davis issued his first album, Dreams About Life, on Folkways in 1978 with production help from Moses Asch; at the same time he began acting, taking a recurring part on the daytime drama One Life to Live and appearing in the 1984 hip-hop feature Beat Street. Seeking a vehicle that united his musical and theatrical interests, he found it in 1991 with the Broadway musical Mulebone, drawn from a Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes script and scored by Taj Mahal. His title-role performance two years later in the off-Broadway drama Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil brought strong notices and later earned the Blues Foundation’s W.C. Handy “Keeping the Blues Alive” Award.

He wrote and starred in the 1994 off-Broadway one-man show In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, another blues-centered work that drew favorable attention. The next year Davis joined his parents for Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy, which merged new songs with African-American folklore and history; around the same period he composed music for the PBS series The American Promise and had earlier received an Emmy for the telefilm To Be a Man. Returning with fresh commitment to acoustic country-blues in fall 1995, he released the live album Stomp Down Rider on Red House, followed in 1996 by Call Down the Thunder. You Don't Know My Mind appeared in 1998 and was nominated for W.C. Handy Awards in the Best Traditional Blues Album and Best Acoustic Blues Album categories, while Davis himself received a Best Acoustic Blues Artist nomination. Early in 2000 he delivered Butt Naked Free, his fourth Red House release.

Throughout the following decade Davis continued releasing well-regarded recordings, among them Give in Kind in 2002, Legacy in 2004, and Skunkmello in 2006, and supplied tracks to tribute collections such as “Soulful Wind” on Labour of Love: The Music of Nick Lowe, “Some of These Days” on Down the Dirt Road: The Songs of Charley Patton, and “Sweetheart Like You” on Nod to Bob: An Artist's Tribute to Bob Dylan. Extensive touring carried him from Greenland to the Ukraine to the Equator, and he has presented residency performances at the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Center Institute. He also maintained an active teaching schedule. After two albums on other labels, Davis returned to Red House for Sweetheart Like You in 2009. The 2012 Smokeydoke Records release The Adventures of Fishey Waters: In Bed with the Blues took the shape of an audio play, extending his theatrical focus. Juba Dance, a spare acoustic set from 2013, preceded the stylistically wide-ranging Kokomo Kid in 2015, his first project as sole producer.