Arkansas native Hank Davis, a guitarist and vocalist, navigated multiple stylistic shifts across a long professional span. Early Elvis Presley sides prompted him to cut dozens of unreleased demos throughout the 1960s. Alongside two Black ministers, he performed as the Blues Brothers—well before Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi popularized another group under that name—concentrating on blues and gospel material. Relocating to Canada in the early 1970s, he resurfaced as a country artist. From a modest home studio in southern Ontario, Davis joined steel guitarist Winnie Winston to lay down sufficient tracks for eight albums, two of them instrumental sets issued under the Raunch Radley name.
Born in the tiny community of Dry Heave, Arkansas, roughly 120 miles from Little Rock, Davis received his first guitar instruction from his uncle, “Shagpoke” Davis, at age twelve. In 1955 he and his band played the Dixie Bar ’n’ Grill in Dry Heave; the next year they auditioned for Sun Records in Memphis. Upon learning in 1958 that the label had misplaced the tapes, he got drunk and boarded a bus that carried him, unintentionally, to Montreal. He stayed in that city, becoming a steady attraction at Le Mangeur de Merde while cutting his initial singles for Disques Frogges. Still enrolled in high school at the time of those releases, he made an appearance on Alan Freed’s television program.
During stays in New York City, Davis passed countless hours backstage at the Paramount Theater and inside Brill Building offices. After completing additional demos, he departed for graduate studies in Boston. Reaching that city amid the peak of the folk revival, he assembled the Blues Brothers. The trio cut two albums and performed across the Southeast before Davis chose to settle permanently in Canada, establishing himself in northern Ontario during the early 1970s. He later toured England in the late 1970s.
