Betty Davis – Betty: They Say I’m Different

23rd December 2019

Funk Queen Betty Davis changed the landscape for female artists in America. She “was the first…” as former husband Miles Davis said. “Madonna before Madonna, Prince before Prince”.

An aspiring songwriter from a small steel town, Betty Davis arrived on the 70’s scene to break boundaries for women with her daring personality, iconic fashion and outrageous funk music.

She befriended Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, wrote songs for the Chambers Brothers and the Commodores, and married Miles – startlingly turning him from jazz to funk on the album she named “Bitches Brew”.

She then, despite being banned and boycotted, went on to become the first black woman to perform, write and manage herself. Betty was a feminist pioneer, inspiring and intimidating in a manner like no woman before. Then suddenly – she vanished.

Creatively blending documentary and animation, Betty – They Say I’m Different traces the path of Betty’s life, how she grew from humble upbringings to become a fully self-realized black female pioneer the world failed to understand or appreciate.

After years of trying, the elusive Betty, forever the free-spirited Black Power Goddess, finally allowed the filmmakers to creatively tell her story based on their conversations.

As a model in 1966, Betty first met jazz musician Miles Davis who was 19 years her senior at a concert. At the time he was separated from his first wife, dancer Frances Davis, and he was dating actress Cicely Tyson. Betty began dating Miles in early 1968, and were married in September 1968. In just one year of marriage, she influenced him greatly by introducing him to the fashions and the new popular music trends of the era. In his autobiography, Miles credited Betty with helping to plant the seeds of his future musical explorations by introducing the trumpeter to psychedelic rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix and funk innovator Sly Stone. The Miles Davis album Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968) includes a song named after her and her photo on the front cover.

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