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| "The Singing Governor" they called him. He lived up to it. |
Another chapter about a country musician turned politician. The origin story’s rougher in this one – as are the politics.
James “Jimmie” Houston Davis was born somewhere around 1899 (his actual date of birth was unknown) and raised dirt-poor with 10 siblings in Beech Springs, Louisiana, in Jackson Parish. In later interviews – and, given his career, he may have embellished a little – Davis recalled not having an actual bed until he turned nine and receiving a dried hog bladder and a "plucked blackbird" as the first gifts he received (he and his siblings used the bladder as a ball and they ate the blackbird). He figured out early that he’d need an education if he didn’t want to end his days as a sharecropper.
After graduating high school and wrapping up at New Orleans’ Soule Business College, Davis worked toward a bachelor’s degree in history at Louisiana College in Pineville. While there, he became a staple in a slew of music clubs – e.g., glee clubs and quartets with macho names like Wildcat Four and Tiger Four (he sang tenor) – and did a little more singing in the evenings, including on street corners, to help pay his way through. Despite the occasional setback (e.g., he had to drop out a term), Davis graduated and moved on to graduate school in Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he mastered in education...and wrote a master’s thesis on the “differences in intelligence between the races” titled Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes. This foreshadows part of the man in whole...
Jimmie Davis lasted only the 1928-29 academic year as a teacher at Dodd’s College for Girls, before taking a job as a clerk at the Shreveport Criminal Court, a job he held for nearly a decade. His music career actually started as moonlighting: he sang at Shreveport’s radio station, KWKH, for $5/week and was recording sides for Victor Talking Machine Company as early as 1928. About that:
“The roughly 60 sides Davis recorded for Victor between 1928 and 1934 were, in the words of country music historian John Morthland, as quoted in London, England's Daily Telegraph, ‘the dirtiest batch of songs any one person had ever recorded in country music.’”
The titles included “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” “Red Nightgown Blues,” and “Organ Grinder’s Blues” – the latter being a nod to “a popular anti-impotence monkey-gland treatment popularized by quack physician and heavy radio advertiser John R. Brinkley.” As an aside that shows the complexity of his time and place, Davis recorded a number of his earlier sides with a black blues musician named Oscar “Buddy” Woods. He would later move on from the down-‘n’-dirty blues, but, while he would downplay them, he never disavowed the recordings. When Davis started his political career in earnest, his opponents tried to offend voters by playing Davis’ early recordings over a loudspeaker; they started dancing instead.
Davis’ music career got started in earnest when he switched to Decca Records in 1934 and, with a group of like-minded area musicians, started developing a smoother, sweeter style of country music with the tone borrowed from popular crooners like Bing Crosby. He scored his first bonafide hit with 1934’s “It Makes No Difference Now,” and he had another big one with "Nobody's Darling but Mine," but Davis would have to wait half a dozen years for his breakthrough hit. About that...
“But even if Rice wrote the song, it might not have been an entirely original work. Country music historians found traces of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ in earlier recordings from the 1930s, including the refrain from a Hawaiian tune, which suggests that the timeless melody and sentiments originated in folklore before being shaped by professional musicians.”
Every account I read agrees on two things: 1) Jimmie Davis did not write “You Are My Sunshine,” though he would claim he did to the end, and 2) that he bought the song from a guy named Paul Rice; just two sources mention that Davis bought the rights in partnership with his slide-guitarist Charles Mitchell at $17.50 each and that Rice took the money to cover his wife’s hospital bills. As it happens, Rice Brothers’ Gang didn’t even record the first version of the famous single (but this was how Rice got his name on the writing credits); they recorded their version on September 13, 1939, while another group, the Pine Ridge Boys, recorded their version on August 22, 1939, for Victor’s budget label, Bluebird Records. The only person I saw named as an original author was a guy named Oliver Hood. Basically, the origin story of “You Are My Sunshine” was something like a gold rush, with Davis coming out on top when he published and recorded his famous version in early 1940.
The Jimmie Davis story takes a detour at this point, one you’d think would be bigger than it was. His political career started in earnest with his election as Shreveport’s public safety commissioner in 1938; he took another step up in 1942 when he won a four-year term to the Louisiana Public Service Commission: just two years later, and quite probably on the back of the name recognition he got from his then-flourishing career, Davis ran for and won his first term as Louisiana’s governor. His style of campaigning stood out; he rarely crawled into the gutter with his opponents, and he took the business of governing seriously. Moreover, he took as many opportunities as he could to act as a conciliator between various factions that arose during the governorship of Louisiana’s famous/infamous Huey Long (Davis was not a fan). A typical Davis campaign event featured a short speech followed by a longer session of live music. (For those interested by the ins & outs of how Davis got elected, Wikipedia has plenty of minutiae.)
James “Jimmie” Houston Davis was born somewhere around 1899 (his actual date of birth was unknown) and raised dirt-poor with 10 siblings in Beech Springs, Louisiana, in Jackson Parish. In later interviews – and, given his career, he may have embellished a little – Davis recalled not having an actual bed until he turned nine and receiving a dried hog bladder and a "plucked blackbird" as the first gifts he received (he and his siblings used the bladder as a ball and they ate the blackbird). He figured out early that he’d need an education if he didn’t want to end his days as a sharecropper.
After graduating high school and wrapping up at New Orleans’ Soule Business College, Davis worked toward a bachelor’s degree in history at Louisiana College in Pineville. While there, he became a staple in a slew of music clubs – e.g., glee clubs and quartets with macho names like Wildcat Four and Tiger Four (he sang tenor) – and did a little more singing in the evenings, including on street corners, to help pay his way through. Despite the occasional setback (e.g., he had to drop out a term), Davis graduated and moved on to graduate school in Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he mastered in education...and wrote a master’s thesis on the “differences in intelligence between the races” titled Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes. This foreshadows part of the man in whole...
Jimmie Davis lasted only the 1928-29 academic year as a teacher at Dodd’s College for Girls, before taking a job as a clerk at the Shreveport Criminal Court, a job he held for nearly a decade. His music career actually started as moonlighting: he sang at Shreveport’s radio station, KWKH, for $5/week and was recording sides for Victor Talking Machine Company as early as 1928. About that:
“The roughly 60 sides Davis recorded for Victor between 1928 and 1934 were, in the words of country music historian John Morthland, as quoted in London, England's Daily Telegraph, ‘the dirtiest batch of songs any one person had ever recorded in country music.’”
The titles included “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” “Red Nightgown Blues,” and “Organ Grinder’s Blues” – the latter being a nod to “a popular anti-impotence monkey-gland treatment popularized by quack physician and heavy radio advertiser John R. Brinkley.” As an aside that shows the complexity of his time and place, Davis recorded a number of his earlier sides with a black blues musician named Oscar “Buddy” Woods. He would later move on from the down-‘n’-dirty blues, but, while he would downplay them, he never disavowed the recordings. When Davis started his political career in earnest, his opponents tried to offend voters by playing Davis’ early recordings over a loudspeaker; they started dancing instead.
Davis’ music career got started in earnest when he switched to Decca Records in 1934 and, with a group of like-minded area musicians, started developing a smoother, sweeter style of country music with the tone borrowed from popular crooners like Bing Crosby. He scored his first bonafide hit with 1934’s “It Makes No Difference Now,” and he had another big one with "Nobody's Darling but Mine," but Davis would have to wait half a dozen years for his breakthrough hit. About that...
“But even if Rice wrote the song, it might not have been an entirely original work. Country music historians found traces of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ in earlier recordings from the 1930s, including the refrain from a Hawaiian tune, which suggests that the timeless melody and sentiments originated in folklore before being shaped by professional musicians.”
Every account I read agrees on two things: 1) Jimmie Davis did not write “You Are My Sunshine,” though he would claim he did to the end, and 2) that he bought the song from a guy named Paul Rice; just two sources mention that Davis bought the rights in partnership with his slide-guitarist Charles Mitchell at $17.50 each and that Rice took the money to cover his wife’s hospital bills. As it happens, Rice Brothers’ Gang didn’t even record the first version of the famous single (but this was how Rice got his name on the writing credits); they recorded their version on September 13, 1939, while another group, the Pine Ridge Boys, recorded their version on August 22, 1939, for Victor’s budget label, Bluebird Records. The only person I saw named as an original author was a guy named Oliver Hood. Basically, the origin story of “You Are My Sunshine” was something like a gold rush, with Davis coming out on top when he published and recorded his famous version in early 1940.
The Jimmie Davis story takes a detour at this point, one you’d think would be bigger than it was. His political career started in earnest with his election as Shreveport’s public safety commissioner in 1938; he took another step up in 1942 when he won a four-year term to the Louisiana Public Service Commission: just two years later, and quite probably on the back of the name recognition he got from his then-flourishing career, Davis ran for and won his first term as Louisiana’s governor. His style of campaigning stood out; he rarely crawled into the gutter with his opponents, and he took the business of governing seriously. Moreover, he took as many opportunities as he could to act as a conciliator between various factions that arose during the governorship of Louisiana’s famous/infamous Huey Long (Davis was not a fan). A typical Davis campaign event featured a short speech followed by a longer session of live music. (For those interested by the ins & outs of how Davis got elected, Wikipedia has plenty of minutiae.)
This same period saw Davis make regular appearances in a succession of Hollywood movies, aka, “horse operas” where he’d play himself and that mainly served as marketing for his music (i.e., “Films such as Mississippi Rhythm were short, thinly veiled excuses to showcase a few songs from Davis and his band, but Louisiana (1947) was a more ambitious rags-to-riches tale based on Davis's own life.”) Every source I read included some version of the phrase, “Davis didn’t let his work as governor get in the way of his music career”; the same applied to the movies. While he remained popular enough, some Louisianans noticed as his absences piled up to the tune of 44 days in 1944-45, 68 days in 1945-45, and a whopping 108 days in 1946-47.
Because the current laws prevented Louisiana’s governors from serving consecutive terms, Davis stepped down in 1948 and returned to the music business. He further softened his sound with a dip into gospel music – “Suppertime” is a famous example – and he continued to record over the next couple decades. By the time his long career ended, Jimmie Davis had recorded over 40 albums between Victor and Decca. Still, he would always be most famous for “You Are My Sunshine,” which racked up all kinds of honors over the years – e.g., the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, one of the Recording Industry of America’s “Songs of the Century,” and No. 73 on CMT’s Greatest Country Songs of All Time.
While I usually like to end these posts on a brighter note, Jimmie Davis’ second term as governor, which ran from 1960 to 1964, deserves some mention. There is no question that Davis was an outright bigot: how can he be otherwise when he declared himself “1,000 percent” for segregation and promised “no retreat and no compromise” on this issue; then there’s this little horror:
“As part of his support of segregation, Davis initiated passage of state legislation to create the Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, which operated from 1960 to 1967. It ‘espoused states rights, anti-communist and segregationist ideas, with a particular focus on maintaining the status quo in race relations. It was closely allied with the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities.’ It was modeled after Mississippi's commission, established in 1956 to resist integration. Davis tapped Frank Voelker Jr., City Attorney of Lake Providence, to chair the newly established Commission. It was given unusual powers to investigate state citizens, and used its authority to exert economic pressure to suppress civil rights activists.”
The best thing one can say is that Davis appeared to take the second half of “separate but equal” seriously. And when desegregation came to Louisiana during his term, he allowed it to happen “without the violence that occurred in other states.” He also invested heavily in education, made serious investments in Louisiana’s healthcare system, and managed to leave the state budget with a healthy surplus, if only in his first term. If you take his political career as a whole, he’s a pretty fair one-stop exemplar of a New Deal-era Southern Democratic politician.
Jimmie Davis had an incredibly long life. When he finally passed, he was the oldest living former governor and, because he lasted into the year 2000, he was the last living governor born in the 19th century. It’s rightly hard to look around his one major blemish – e.g., his defense of segregation (also, see his master’s thesis) – you can’t take the man out of his time and place. He had a good side – e.g., that calm, conciliating public persona – and he built his political career around fighting the poverty he experienced first-hand (going the other way, he had a lot of the resource extraction industrialists in his corner as well). And he had a decent sense of humor. At one point later in his career, someone must have asked about his songwriting. Someone quoted and contextualized his response:
“By that time Davis had married Shreveport socialite Alverna Adams, another critic of his dirty songs. ‘I try out a song on my wife,’ he was quoted as saying in the New York Times, ‘and if she doesn't like it, I rush right out and record it.’”
Sources
Wikipedia – Jimmie Davis
Wikipedia – “You Are My Sunshine”
Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
64 Parishes Bio
MusicianGuide.com
About the Sampler
I could resist the dirty ones and couldn’t ignore his biggest hits, but balanced the rest of the 20 song sampler between what I’m taking to be his early recordings and his later, smoother hits. Under the former, I included (of the songs not already linked to above):
“Jellyroll Blues,” “Mama’s Getting Hot and Papa’s Getting Cold,” “Come on Over to My House (Ain’t Nobody Home But Me),” “High Behind Blues,” “I’ll Get Mine Bye and Bye,” “The Keyhole in the Door,” “Davis’ Salty Dog,” and “Graveyard Blues.”
And, under the latter:
“There’s a New Moon Over My Shoulder” (a hit he recorded during his first term as governor), “The End of the World,” “There’s a Goldmine in the Sky,” and “A Sinner’s Prayer” (examples of his gospel phase? pre-gospel phase?), “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” plus still later in his career, “Columbus Stockade Blues.” A couple more songs round it out – “Sweethearts or Strangers” and “Bang Bang” (possibly from the movie Louisiana) – but that gives a pretty good taste.
Till the next one...
Because the current laws prevented Louisiana’s governors from serving consecutive terms, Davis stepped down in 1948 and returned to the music business. He further softened his sound with a dip into gospel music – “Suppertime” is a famous example – and he continued to record over the next couple decades. By the time his long career ended, Jimmie Davis had recorded over 40 albums between Victor and Decca. Still, he would always be most famous for “You Are My Sunshine,” which racked up all kinds of honors over the years – e.g., the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, one of the Recording Industry of America’s “Songs of the Century,” and No. 73 on CMT’s Greatest Country Songs of All Time.
While I usually like to end these posts on a brighter note, Jimmie Davis’ second term as governor, which ran from 1960 to 1964, deserves some mention. There is no question that Davis was an outright bigot: how can he be otherwise when he declared himself “1,000 percent” for segregation and promised “no retreat and no compromise” on this issue; then there’s this little horror:
“As part of his support of segregation, Davis initiated passage of state legislation to create the Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, which operated from 1960 to 1967. It ‘espoused states rights, anti-communist and segregationist ideas, with a particular focus on maintaining the status quo in race relations. It was closely allied with the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities.’ It was modeled after Mississippi's commission, established in 1956 to resist integration. Davis tapped Frank Voelker Jr., City Attorney of Lake Providence, to chair the newly established Commission. It was given unusual powers to investigate state citizens, and used its authority to exert economic pressure to suppress civil rights activists.”
The best thing one can say is that Davis appeared to take the second half of “separate but equal” seriously. And when desegregation came to Louisiana during his term, he allowed it to happen “without the violence that occurred in other states.” He also invested heavily in education, made serious investments in Louisiana’s healthcare system, and managed to leave the state budget with a healthy surplus, if only in his first term. If you take his political career as a whole, he’s a pretty fair one-stop exemplar of a New Deal-era Southern Democratic politician.
Jimmie Davis had an incredibly long life. When he finally passed, he was the oldest living former governor and, because he lasted into the year 2000, he was the last living governor born in the 19th century. It’s rightly hard to look around his one major blemish – e.g., his defense of segregation (also, see his master’s thesis) – you can’t take the man out of his time and place. He had a good side – e.g., that calm, conciliating public persona – and he built his political career around fighting the poverty he experienced first-hand (going the other way, he had a lot of the resource extraction industrialists in his corner as well). And he had a decent sense of humor. At one point later in his career, someone must have asked about his songwriting. Someone quoted and contextualized his response:
“By that time Davis had married Shreveport socialite Alverna Adams, another critic of his dirty songs. ‘I try out a song on my wife,’ he was quoted as saying in the New York Times, ‘and if she doesn't like it, I rush right out and record it.’”
Sources
Wikipedia – Jimmie Davis
Wikipedia – “You Are My Sunshine”
Country Music Hall of Fame Bio
64 Parishes Bio
MusicianGuide.com
About the Sampler
I could resist the dirty ones and couldn’t ignore his biggest hits, but balanced the rest of the 20 song sampler between what I’m taking to be his early recordings and his later, smoother hits. Under the former, I included (of the songs not already linked to above):
“Jellyroll Blues,” “Mama’s Getting Hot and Papa’s Getting Cold,” “Come on Over to My House (Ain’t Nobody Home But Me),” “High Behind Blues,” “I’ll Get Mine Bye and Bye,” “The Keyhole in the Door,” “Davis’ Salty Dog,” and “Graveyard Blues.”
And, under the latter:
“There’s a New Moon Over My Shoulder” (a hit he recorded during his first term as governor), “The End of the World,” “There’s a Goldmine in the Sky,” and “A Sinner’s Prayer” (examples of his gospel phase? pre-gospel phase?), “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland,” plus still later in his career, “Columbus Stockade Blues.” A couple more songs round it out – “Sweethearts or Strangers” and “Bang Bang” (possibly from the movie Louisiana) – but that gives a pretty good taste.
Till the next one...
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