By Richard Chandler Burroughs.
Betty Mabry is an unrepentant bad ass who left an indelible mark on music in the late Sixties and Seventies and thanks to the resourcefulness of the Internet, has been discovered by new fans and rediscovered by the music industry.
The ghost writer to the latest chapter in the life of singer Betty Mabry nee’ Davis, is the extreme inevitableness of her ascent. Her brand of music was too progressively aggressive for the times. In fact, her music was too progressively aggressive for her former husband, Jazz great Miles Davis, whose golden legacy Betty burnished. The Eighties ushered in a levee break of America’s chastity belt, led by “I Want My MTV” and it’s audience’s attendant proclivity for promiscuity in it’s musical tastes; but Ms. Mabry had already left the proverbial building by then. Betty’s story is not about regrets and what ifs, It’s a celebration of a woman’s steadfast belief that her art, growl, salacious lyrics and ownership of her sexuality was beyond compromise.
Her’s was the classic story of a dreamer and striver. Well, maybe not that hokey, but Betty Mabry definitely knew that it was a locomotive at the depot with her name on it. Born in Durham, North Carolina, she spent her formative years living on her grandmother’s farm in Reidsville and listening to the albums of her grandmother’s favorite Blues artists, including John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reid and Lightening Hopkins. Those records would be a strong musical influence on Betty, helping to shape her sound and her style of writing; which was her true passion.
Smartly talented and having absorbed the differences between the Durham lifestyle and living in Pittsburgh, where her family moved when she was Twelve years old, Betty skipped a grade and moved to New York City at the age of Sixteen. Ostensibly, she relocated to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology while living with her aunt, but the steel town ingenue really came to conquer the city with a turquoise chain. Moving through a myriad of circles in the late Sixties, Betty strategically placed herself in the key social scenes and traveled the road where being beautiful and stylish was a commodity. Signed by the Wilhelmina model agency, with frequent bookings for magazines, runway shows and commercials, it was Betty’s socializing and positioning at night, amongst the A-List nightlife crowd, that had a greater hand in forging her destined reign in the world of entertainment.
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