Rev. Gary Davis

During his late twenties, Reverend Gary Davis ranked among the two leading exponents of East Coast ragtime guitar. Thirty-five years afterward, after spending two decades performing on Harlem sidewalks in New York, he remained a towering presence in the idiom, appearing before crowds numbering in the thousands and shaping the approach of numerous younger guitarist-singers such as Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and Donovan, along with Jorma Kaukonen, David Bromberg, and Ry Cooder, the last three of whom took lessons directly from him.

Born with limited vision that deteriorated to total blindness before adulthood, Davis began teaching himself guitar at age six. By his twenties he commanded one of the most sophisticated techniques in blues, standing alongside only Blind Arthur Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Willie Johnson among ragtime-rooted players; he in turn exerted a decisive influence on Blind Boy Fuller.

His music absorbed gospel, marches, ragtime, jazz, and minstrel hokum, which he fused into a distinctly personal idiom. After the family relocated to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1911 while he was still a teenager, he came under the tutelage of local masters Willie Walker, Sam Brooks, and Baby Brooks. By the mid-1920s, when he settled in Durham and became a full-time street performer, his command of multiple styles and his unmatched dexterity on the instrument had already earned widespread local acclaim.

Davis entered a recording studio for the first time in the 1930s under the sponsorship of a local businessman. He cut a mix of blues and spirituals for the American Record Company, yet received no fair compensation; as a result, nineteen years passed before he recorded again. During those years his outlook shifted. Like other street musicians, he had routinely inserted gospel numbers among blues and ragtime pieces to deter police interference; over time he treated the sacred repertoire with greater seriousness, culminating in his ordination as a minister in 1937. Thereafter he largely declined to perform blues.

Davis relocated to New York in the early 1940s and resumed preaching and busking on Harlem corners. He returned to the studio at the close of the decade for two gospel sides, but a broader audience did not reemerge until the mid-1950s. Recordings of his now exclusively sacred material appeared on Stinson, Folkways, and Riverside, the last of which captured seven selections in early 1956. Rediscovered by the folk revival, he eventually consented to appear at the Newport Folk Festival, where his raw-voiced sermons—above all the luminous “Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way),” long linked to Blind Willie Johnson, and “Twelve Gates to the City”—became annual highlights. He also cut a live Vanguard album at one such concert and featured on several Newport anthology releases, while two television documentaries, made in 1967 and 1970, documented his work.

Davis emerged as one of the most sought-after figures on the folk and blues revival circuits, drawing large, appreciative audiences. Although most of his performances were spirituals, they retained clear ties to the blues he had recorded in the 1930s, and his instrumental mastery endured. Playing the jumbo Gibson acoustics he preferred, he astonished listeners with intricate picking, strumming, and interwoven melodies. During this period he also became a teacher whose pupils included prominent white guitarists such as David Bromberg and Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, who later included Davis’s “I’ll Be Alright” on his solo album Quah!.

The Reverend Gary Davis left an extensive catalog of postwar recordings stretching into the 1960s, embracing the revival of his career as an opportunity to convey the gospel to fresh listeners. He even re-recorded several of his earlier blues and ragtime pieces in the studio expressly for his students.