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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.
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.
