By her own admission, Betty Davis wasn’t a virtuosic singer—especially not when you stack her against Aretha Franklin or Chaka Khan. But to call her a “singer”—and a singer only—would be to diminish the scope of her art and the impact it came to have. In the early ’70s, when male R&B and funk singers were exploring politics (think Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and even James Brown), Davis (born Betty Mabry) turned towards the bedroom, not because she found it more interesting, but because, as she later put it, it was one of the few places women had power—a foreshadowing of the frank, sex-positive attitude of female artists from Madonna to Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé. Davis, who died in February 2022 at the age of 77, wrote about dominance and submission (“He Was a Big Freak”), about the difference between prostitution and hustling (“Don’t Call Her No Tramp”), and performed with a rawness that brought the X-rated blues of singers like Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton into the post-Summer of Love era (“They Say I'm Different”). Like plenty of visionaries, her career was brief (for years, her albums were the province of crate-diggers and obscurantists) but has played out like a depth charge. Her former husband, Miles Davis (yes, that one), said if she’d kept making music, she would’ve become something like the female Prince—peerless, always a step ahead of her time.