American funk and soul singer, Betty Davis, is dead.
She died aged 77.
The news of her death was confirmed by her friend, Danielle Maggio on Wednesday.
Amie Downs, communications director for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where Davis resided, also told Rolling Stone magazine that her cause of death was from natural causes.
Davis is mostly remembered for her controversially sexual lyrics and performance style, and as having been Miles Davis’s second wife.
The singer and model was also famously married music icon Miles Davis, who was 19 years her senior, in 1968 after two years of dating.
However, their marriage lasted just a year before filing for divorce.
After the end of her marriage with Miles, Betty moved to London, probably around 1971, to pursue her modeling career.
She wrote music while in the UK and, after about a year, returned to the US with the intention of recording songs with Santana.
Instead, she recorded her own songs with a group of West Coast funk musicians. Davis wrote and arranged all her songs.
Her first record, Betty Davis, was released in 1973. She released two more studio albums, They Say I’m Different (1974) and her major-label debut on Island Records Nasty Gal (1975). None of the three albums was a commercial success, but she had two minor hits on the Billboard R&B chart: “If I’m in Luck I Might Get Picked Up”, which reached no. 66 in 1973, and “Shut Off the Lights”, which reached no. 97 in 1975.
Davis quit the music industry after 1975 and moved to Pittsburgh for a life out of the spotlight.
Opening up about her decision to retire, Davis told The New York Times in 2018: ‘When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking at my door.’
In 2019, Davis released “A Little Bit Hot Tonight”, her first new song in over 40 years, which was performed by Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist who is a friend and associate producer on Betty: They Say I’m Different.
