Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,799
By This is the grave of Billy Davis, though very hard to read because of the interaction between the rain and that smooth black stone. Also, I seem to have deleted the picture of the headstone itself. As always, professional quality work here!
Born in 1932 in Detroit moved into the city’s fecund music scene as a teen. He was a cousin to Lawrence Payton, one of the singers of The Four Tops (in fact, the grave to the right in the photo is Payton’s). They performed together in one of the groups Payton had before his famous one, which was called The Four Aims. But what Davis really specialized in was what few of the singers of this scene did, which was write good songs. He got to know Berry Gordy and together they started writing songs for Jackie Wilson. Among those songs was “Lonely Teardrops,” cowritten by the two of them and Gwen Gordy, Berry’s sister and Davis’ girlfriend. Among his other important songs include “Reet Pettite,” a hit in the UK for Wilson both in 1957 and on a 1986 re-release, and “You Got What It Takes,” which went big for Marv Johnson in 1959.
In the early 60s, Davis left Detroit for awhile. Leonard Chess wanted his skills for the blues scene in Chicago. Davis took over the artistic side of Chess, leaving the founder to handle the business stuff, which he was better at anyway. This was also the moment when Chess was moving outside of its traditional blues market and wanted to spread its wings into other parts of Black music. Davis knew everyone and so was such a good songwriter that lots of people came to work with him during these years. He also became a skilled producer. Among those who came to Chicago to write and record with him in these years include Chuck Berry, Etta James, Little Milton, and, of course, Jackie Wilson.
In 1968, Davis left Chess. The company wasn’t doing well anyway, as trends in music were changing fast. In fact, it would be sold shortly after he left. He engaged in a lucrative career shift. Being a good songwriter who specialized in catchy bits, he got hired by the advertising firm McCann Erickson in New York to write jingles for them. His most famous ad song is the most famous ad song in perhaps all of history–“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” which was that company’s famous cooptation of the hippie movement to sell sugar water and which was memorably used as the series ending of Mad Men. Yeah, that was Davis’ tune, sort of it. He had actually rewritten a tune actually called “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” by the New Seekers that was a flop as a single. But all this work was collaborative and while everyone needs to be mentioned who was involved in productions of songs like this if you are doing a complete history of them (which this post is very much not), Davis was absolutely critical to making this perhaps the most iconic jingle in television history. He also wrote the song in the famous Mean Joe Greene Coke ad, where a kid tosses an exhausted Greene a Coke. He drinks it and then tosses his journey back to the kid. The song was called “Have a Coke a Smile” and the ad itself is considered one of the most influential ads of all time. So that’s two of the most important ads in history that Davis wrote for.
Another big part of Davis’ advertising second career was getting work for older legends such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin pitching products. He wrote pretty broadly too, including country songs for a Coke campaign that used Dottie West as a pitchwoman. West is largely forgotten today except by hard core country fans, but she was huge in the 70s and 80s.
Davis died in 2004. He was 72 years old. It was “natural causes,” whatever that means.
Billy Davis is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan
In 2007, Davis was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame, which actually goes back all the way to 1948. If you would like this series to visit other august inductees of this institution, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Neil Borden, who coined the term “marketing mix,” is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Michael Roarty, who created most of the well-known Budweiser advertisements of the late 20th century, is in St, Louis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.