Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

Excerpted from Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis by Ian Zack (footnotes omitted). Copyright © 2015. Courtesy of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Elderly blacks in Laurens County, South Carolina, still remember an old railroad trestle and a putrid piece of rope that hung from it for decades. The rope, they say, had last been put to use back in 1913 by a white mob that lynched a black man accused of rape. While the rope and trestle live on only as jagged shards of memory, other unpleasant reminders endure of the harrowing environment in which Gary Davis grew up, most notably the Ku Klux Klan Museum and Redneck Shop, housed in what used to be a segregated movie theater. Items available for purchase at the shop include white hooded robes, Klan stickers, and photocopies of “Whites Only” segregation signs.

A few paces away is the Laurens County Courthouse, a Corinthian columned building that looks about the same as it did in Davis’s youth. The courthouse square in the city of Laurens, the county seat, retains a retro feel, its red brick storefronts adorned with Coca-Cola and Bull Durham Tobacco ads painted on the side. It doesn’t take a lot of conjuring to envision the old stagecoach route that linked Laurens County to Greenville and Spartanburg to the northwest in the 1800s. Back then, if you had traveled along that dirt thoroughfare from the courthouse and veered off a great distance into the gently rolling hills, you’d have eventually found yourself amid a quiet patchwork of ragged farms, mountain-fed creeks, and lush forestland miles from any hint of bustle. This is the place where Gary Davis’s life began — and might well have ended, if not for his astonishing musical gifts.

Laurens County was in the midst of social and economic turmoil in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Union victory in the Civil War had left the state’s farm economy in ruins. Many white farmers who’d depended on forced labor had been wiped out as four hundred thousand South Carolina slaves became free under the watchful eyes of federal troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Farmers who’d managed to stay afloat still needed a workforce, and newly freed blacks had few skills outside of farm work, so the uneasy alliances of sharecropping and tenant farming had arisen in place of outright servitude.

At the same time, a violent struggle had erupted over Reconstruction, as whites aimed to take back what Robert E. Lee’s troops lost on the battlefield. One center of resistance was Laurens County in the northwest corner of the state. In 1870 it was the scene of a bloody riot, when a brief battle between white and black militias over a local election prompted thousands of armed white men to descend on horseback from surrounding counties; they chased down and attacked blacks over several days, killing six, including a recently elected black state legislator, whose corpse was left rotting in the road. As terrorist acts against blacks escalated statewide, President Ulysses S. Grant tried in vain to assert federal authority and tamp down the influence of the Ku Klux Klan by suspending habeas corpus in Laurens and eight other South Carolina counties and placing them under martial law. But by the time the century drew to a close, Washington gave up trying to impose its will and turned its attention elsewhere.

In 1895, South Carolina’s new constitution effectively resurrected the antebellum order. The charter imposed, among other things, a poll tax and de facto literacy test for voting — voters had to be able to read or interpret an entire passage of the state constitution, an impossibility for illiterate former slaves — as well as a ban on interracial marriage; it provided the legal basis for the Jim Crow laws and customs that would subjugate blacks for decades to come. The following year, the US Supreme Court established “separate but equal” as the law of the land from sea to shining sea.

If life was hard for most black South Carolinians then, it was especially so in Laurens County, where only 4 percent of blacks worked a farm they owned, the second-lowest proportion of the state’s forty counties. John and Evelina Davis were among the sharecroppers in Laurens trying to eke out an existence on a patch of someone else’s land. On April 30, 1896, their eldest son, Gary, was born.

Gary Davis’s mother, the former Evelina Martin, was seventeen when she gave birth, and she would go on to have a total of eight children, most likely by multiple fathers. But with proper medical care for blacks practically nonexistent, six of her children died as infants; only Gary and a younger brother — probably a half-brother, named Buddy Pinson — survived, and Buddy would die in 1930 at age twenty-five, stabbed to death by a girlfriend with a butcher’s knife. That would leave Gary as the sole survivor of Evelina Davis’s large brood.

The event that would define Davis’s life — the loss of his sight — occurred soon after birth. “I’d taken sore eyes when I was three weeks old,” he recalled in one version of the story. “They [took] me to a doctor and the doctor put some alum and sweet milk in my eyes and they caused ulcers in my eyes. That’s what caused me to go blind.” In his later application to attend a school for the blind, Davis’s mother would tell a similar story, blaming his blindness on “medicines of doctor who made a mistake.”

A doctor who examined him as an adult would conclude that Davis had suffered both infant glaucoma and ulceration of the cornea, a condition that can result from neonatal conjunctivitis contracted from a mother with gonorrhea and also can afflict children with a severe Vitamin A deficiency. As to what led to Davis’s blindness, a family friend named Tiny Robinson gave a different explanation: she said Davis’s mother blinded him by trying to treat his eye infection with lye soap, an old folk remedy. Davis’s second wife, Annie, corroborated the story about the doctor as Davis himself told it. Both accounts seem plausible, but the common denominator was the absence of even rudimentary medical care. Davis said the doctor told his family that he “might overcome it” as he aged, but he never regained his sight.

Davis’s blindness was “near total,” as his blind school application would note, meaning he wasn’t in complete darkness. That jibes with Davis’s own description decades later in New York: “I could tell the look of a person, but to tell who it is, I’m not able to do that.”

The exact location of Davis’s birthplace remains unconfirmed. However, in one interview, when asked about his parents, he said: “This was Mr. Abercrombie’s farm. He had a great big plantation. I don’t know how long we stayed with Mr. Abercrombie ’cause I was a baby then.” The plantation Davis remembered most likely belonged to a Jonathan McCall Abercrombie, who owned 322 acres in Young’s township, in the upper-west quadrant of the county not far from the town of Gray Court.

“My parents were workin’ people — farmers,” Davis recalled. “They raised everything on the farm — chickens, cattle, hogs, dogs… peaches, apples, plums, pears, apricots — pretty near every kind of thing.” Cotton, of course, was the big cash crop, aided by the region’s temperate climate and long growing season, and Davis may have neglected to mention it on that occasion because it was a given.

Davis’s parents weren’t well suited to raising children, and Davis’s maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Annie Spencer, quickly assumed responsibility for young sightless Gary. Davis’s mother “was once upon a time a rough woman” — a southern euphemism for being sexually loose — who was always “twistin’ about from one place to another,” Davis remembered, and “didn’t care to be bothered with no children.” His father was “in trouble all the time.” John Davis eventually left South Carolina and was shot to death around 1906 by the sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama, apparently after slitting a lover’s throat and telling the authorities, “Come and get me.”

Evelina Davis not only gave up primary responsibility for raising her son to her mother — she outright rejected Gary emotionally, although she remained in his life. The abandonment had a profound effect on him. As Davis later recalled:

I felt horrible about it ’cause I felt like I was throwed away. In fact, my mother never had cared as much about me as she did my younger brother… He was her heart… Because of the way she talkin’ to me, she’d wish that I were dead. She tell me that a heap of times.

It’s surely no coincidence that the themes of death, abandonment, the lost child in the wilderness, and a reunion with his mother ran through Davis’s gospel message and music. Indeed, gospel as an art form grew out of the misery and deprivation of the southern black experience, and those themes are common in the music as a whole. In Davis’s case, it’s easy to see why. Perhaps his most famous song, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” though based on traditional spirituals, has a strong autobiographical element for the only surviving child of eight, with its signature lament, “death don’t have no mercy in this land.”

Davis would often sing about seeing his mother in heaven, when, presumably, all would be forgiven under God’s grace. But his anger would also remain palpable. In “Lord, I Wish I Could See,” he would address his mother’s rejection in searingly poetic detail, singing: “Nobody cares for me, because I’m away in the dark and I cannot see.” The other theme that would occupy Davis as both a minister and performer — personal salvation and the rejection of sin — can be seen, in part, as a response to the wayward ways of his parents: his mother’s philandering and his father’s “troubles,” which may have been alcohol related. “You got to learn how to live [be]’fore your children,” Davis would sing in “You Got to Go Down,” and it’s likely he had both parents in mind.

Life in Laurens County revolved around the harvest, particularly cotton, although low market prices only added to the economic distress of the landlocked white farmers and their black tenants in the tempestuous decades after the Civil War. Davis and his family had an unsettled life as sharecroppers, to say the least, and it was probably quite desolate, though Davis would rarely discuss his childhood in those terms, and he never tried to elicit any sympathy when asked about his early years. Still, he hinted at the lack of basic necessities like shoes, telling a concert audience in the 1960s that the clay was so red in Laurens that when the rains came it would “put another shoe sole on your foot.”

The Davises rarely stayed on one farm for very long, and Gary’s account of moving year after year during his youth is a remarkable testament to the instability of the sharecropper’s life:

We stayed at Mr. Abercrombie’s place and we moved from that place …near the railroad to Mr. Tan Moore, it was. Then after we left there, we went to Mr. Joe C. Calhoun, and we left there — uh — one place I remember we lived at — I was a small child then — was Mr. Jim Todd’s near a town… and [we] went to Miss Nero Trainhem’s. And we left Miss Trainhem’s and went to Mr. Calhoun Wallace’s place. We left Mr. Calhoun Wallace and went to Waterloo on Mr. Joe Culbertson’s place; and after we left there, we went to Doctor Fuller’s. Left Doc Fuller’s and went to Miss Lou Crummley’s. From Miss Lou Crummley’s, we went to Miss Pet McKilvey’s. From Miss Pet McKilvey’s, we went to Willard Dick. Left there and went to Mr. Paul Roper’s and stayed there. We left Mr. Paul Roper’s and went back to Miss McKilvey’s. From Miss Pet McKilvey’s [to] Mr. Joe Whamps. We left Mr. Joe Whamps and went to Mr. Jim Lewis McCarthy’s. Stayed there for about two years.

The sharecropping system, with its contracts and strict accounting, was intended, in part, to protect black farmers from exploitation, but in practice most were illiterate, and plenty of opportunity existed for landlords to take advantage. Farm owners typically provided supplies like mules and feed as well as clothing and a place to live in return for a quarter to half the harvested crops. Davis recalled how the system kept his family from making any real economic progress:

Down there you worked on the halves, like if you made ten bales [of cotton] you’d get five and the boss man get five. Now if you got $10 from the boss man, he’d look for you to pay $20 back… The guy would come out there with his great big old goggly-looking glasses on his face and say, “Why don’t we run up accounts? Well, you got $150 so-and-so-and-so, and the one day that you didn’t work and I had to hire somebody in your place — I’ll charge you $50 for that. Then you know I had to pay for all the fertilizer, and it comes to soand-so-and-so… Well ah…” and he’d get to figuring up: “Sum total — well, I owe you a nickel!”

Davis’ First Guitar Cost $2.45

White farm owners often had little cash to pay for labor and were inclined to keep tenants on at the end of the cultivating season if they met their obligations as laid out in the rental contract. If not, owners might send them packing unless the tenants had too many debts to pay. Tenants, on the other hand, moved around a lot, seeking the best terms. The Davises, it seemed, had problems with most of their landlords.

Though he was blind, young Gary learned how to do just about everything on the farm, his labor doubtless a necessity for his family. He picked cotton and sugar cane, pulled corn fodder, and baled hay. He had a special affinity for the animals he raised, especially the chickens. He recalled raising 350 head of chicken, who became the future minister’s first flock, alighting onto his shoulders when he approached the coop.

In the absence of any affection from his mother, Davis often called his grandmother “maw.” She cared for him but ran a strict home, whipping him with belts or switches if he got out of line. Housing for sharecroppers consisted of one- or two-room wood frame dwellings, with the children often sleeping on pallets. Food was scarce, and what little they had often went to important guests. “Lots of times my grandmother used to go to church and bring back a gang of preachers and eat up the best food,” Davis remembered. “The rest of the children would be scared to ask for it. I wouldn’t. I’d get to the table… I’d say, ‘Maw, I’ll thank you for some chicken!’” Usually, the response came back: “Eat what’s before you.” And that was “whatever they’d give us. If it would be cornbread and cabbages, it would be that. And if it be butter and bread, we get that. If it be butter, molasses and bread, we get that. If it be bread and milk, we get that.”

Visiting preachers were treated like dignitaries because of the church’s dominant role in black southern life. At a time when blacks endured growing restrictions on their rights and freedoms, renewed assaults on their dignity and physical attacks intended to cow them into submission, the church became, literally, a sanctuary. Nearly every black South Carolinian adult claimed church affiliation. Blacks ran their own congregations, and with politics off limits, churches became the voice of solidarity and aspiration. Ministers and preachers — usually men with engaging personalities and a gift of oratory — occupied a privileged status in the community. One can easily see how Gary regarded these men with awe, given the perquisites they enjoyed.

Davis’s grandma, who had likely been born a slave, was a religious woman. (Plantation owners often encouraged their slaves to sit in on church services and participate in revivals.) She taught Davis his first spiritual, “Children of Zion,” which he would later record and which he would claim was “over five hundred years old,” perhaps suggesting an African origin to the melody. He also remembered first hearing the spirituals “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” and “Blow, Gabriel” from his grandmother. Unlike his mother, Grandma Annie “always would carry me to church and everywhere she wanted to go,” Davis recalled.

As a boy, Davis sang in the choir of the Center Rabun Baptist Church, whose congregation still exists today in Gray Court. The congregation first held services in 1873 under a brush arbor “in the woods,” church members recalled. By 1904, when Davis was eight, the church occupied a forty-by-sixty-foot wood frame building with wings on one side, a belfry, and a baptistery, and its congregation numbered about 125 souls.

Davis later identified himself as a Missionary Baptist. In South Carolina, the Missionary Baptist movement had come into its own during a religious revival in the 1830s that occurred amid the Second Great Awakening, when Protestantism spread rapidly in both the North and South. An evangelical sect, Missionary Baptists put most of their energies into converting the masses and expunging evil from the world in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming. The Missionaries’ focus on saving individual souls appealed to a growing number of slaves throughout the South, who helped it become one of the most popular denominations for rural southern blacks after the Civil War. That evangelical zeal would ultimately follow black migrants like Gary Davis to their small storefront congregations in northern cities, and in his case, evangelism would become his life’s work once he became a minister.

Firsthand accounts of the churches of Davis’s youth are rare. A white woman who identified herself as Aunt Kate witnessed an early twentieth-century black church service in Laurens County, and her chronicle is one of the few that survive from that era. She described a packed church building as “well lighted by gas” and services much more spirited than what she was used to at her own church, including “the shouting they do now, [which] consists of waving the hands and keeping time with the music as their heels strike the floor.” She went on:

The text the preacher took was a very appropriate one for the occasion as the meeting closed that night — “The harvest is past, the summer is ended and ye are not yet saved.” …The singing appealed to me most. How would you like to hear an old time darkey of the Uncle Remus type rise and sing in [a] sweet alto voice as only a negro can, “I have a mother at the beautiful gate. She’s a waiting an’ er watching for me.”

Davis would use similar lyrics in one of his own compositions, “Soon My Work Will All Be Done,” in the 1960s.

The spirituals sung in the early black Baptist churches were those of a people, first enslaved and then oppressed, who dared to conceive of a better life. As James Weldon Johnson would write in the Second Book of Negro Spirituals, the black churchgoer “dreamed his dreams and declared his visions; he uttered his despair and prophesied his victories.” The true meaning of the black spirituals — who churchgoers had in mind when they sang about “the devil,” or what “promised land” they hoped to reach — was known only to them.

If blacks in Laurens County preferred the relatively safe confines of the church, they had good reason. Race relations were touch-andgo at best, and the threat of violence always hung in the air. At their annual convention in 1904, black South Carolina Baptists noted that lynching, homicide, and other capital crimes were on the rise, and it didn’t take much to set a white posse in motion. Davis recounted one story from his youth of a black man who was lynched for hugging a white woman. “They took that man out there and made sausage out of him … that’s what they done.”

Violence could be avoided if certain protocols were followed, as one historian of black life in South Carolina noted:

On public roads and sidewalks, [a black] conceded the right of way to whites and tipped his hat or head to them… He addressed postadolescent whites with titles of respect though such titles were never extended to him. Instead of the respectful “Mr.” he might be called “Professor” or “Reverend,” for white Carolinians regarded those terms as neutral. If he were elderly or “respected,” he was addressed as “Uncle. If his wife were old and “faithful,” she was “Aunt” or “Auntie.”

Not all race relations were bleak. Davis could point to examples of kindness from whites. He always remembered a white neighbor who took pity on the little boy whose mother was rarely around. “He used to tell me about a white lady, how good she was to him,” Davis’s second wife, Annie, recalled. “She’d feed him and… she had a little boy just about his age and size… and they would play together. And he said she’d even let him sleep over at night.”

Music became a part of Davis’s life from a very young age. He took up the harmonica around age five at the encouragement of his mother’s elder brother, William. Davis learned to mimic the squeals of pigs, the squawks of chickens, the chug-a-lug of a steam train, and the baying of hounds on a coon hunt. He became accomplished at the blues harp and often included solo harmonica pieces in his concerts later on. By the time Davis turned seven, his parents had gone their separate ways and his mother had remarried. A stepfather, who didn’t remain in Davis’s life long, bought him his first five-string banjo, and Davis taught himself how to play.

Around the same time a traveling musician came through toting the instrument that would become like Davis’s third arm: “The first time I ever heard a guitar played, I thought it was a brass band coming through,” he remembered. “I was a small kid and I asked my mother what was it, and she said that was a guitar. I said, ‘Ain’t you going to get me one of those when I get large enough?’”

By the late nineteenth century, mail-order houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company had figured out a way to deliver inexpensive, mass-produced guitars to communities across the nation, helping transform what had earlier been largely a parlor amusement for the urban middle class into an egalitarian hobby for all, including the rural poor. Black musicians already well versed on the banjo transferred banjo picking styles to the guitar. At the same time, parlor guitar sheet music, wildly popular among whites in the 1800s, influenced the first generation of southern black songsters and blues musicians, who often included spiced-up versions of parlor guitar favorites like “Sebastopol” and “Spanish Fandango” in their repertoires.

To satisfy his curiosity, seven-year-old Gary made his own guitars, using a brace-and-bit to drill a hole through his grandmother’s pie pans, cutting a piece of timber for the neck, and stretching copper wires across it for strings. For his efforts, his grandma usually whipped him. Soon, Davis’s mother bought him his first guitar, paying $2.50 for an instrument with a “fine tone,” he recalled. (The low-end guitar in the 1902 Sears, Roebuck catalog sold for $2.45.) The new guitar laid around for a week before Gary picked it up. “She went to work and left me with that guitar and she come back that morning and I was eatin’ that guitar up,” Davis said.

A local musician named Craig Fowler taught Davis his first guitar chords. Among the early songs he learned to play were “Darling, You Don’t Know My Mind,” a tune that shows up in the repertoires of both country and blues singers, and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” a spiritual that Davis would later record. Davis and his guitar became inseparable. At night he liked to sit out among the stalks of cane and play under the stars.

Davis’s grandmother didn’t much care for his new hobby. “Oh, put that thing down,” she told him, “or the devil will get you!” But she eventually warmed to his playing of church spirituals. Baptist churches didn’t permit guitars at services, so Davis had to keep his instrument at home. “You better not bring no guitar in no church!” he recalled. “They thought it was wrong. After, I got to reading after the Bible to find out what the Bible said about instruments. I played guitar anytime, Sunday and anytime. No harm in playing music, but it is what you play.”

For a budding guitarist in Laurens County, music could be soaked up everywhere: out in the fields in the form of work songs; at informal porch gatherings, barn raisings, or daylong country picnics; from traveling tent shows; and, of course, at church, where a cappella singing predominated. Davis recalled that two of his most famous songs, “Candy Man” and “Cocaine,” came from traveling carnival shows, which also provided his first exposure to the blues. “The first song that was a blues I heard was a man in a carnival singing ‘I’m on the road somewhere, if the train don’t break down, I’m on the road somewhere,’” Davis recalled.

The One-Handed Guitar Man

Carnival, circus, wild West, and minstrel shows crisscrossed the nation at the turn of the twentieth century, featuring many of the musicians who would pioneer the new sounds of ragtime, blues, and jazz — what music publishers and the press had dubbed “coon songs.” Traveling companies usually pitched huge canvas tents that could seat hundreds of people around a stage lit in the early years by kerosene lamps. They put on extravagant spectacles with music, theatrical comedy, minstrelsy (with both white and black performers in blackface), acrobatics, and circus freak-show acts.

Every show had at least one brass band with a dozen or more members, and some of the white-owned circuses employed a white band for the main stage and a black band for the sideshow tent. When traveling shows arrived in a town, usually by rail, they drummed up business by sending their bands parading through the streets to the town center decked out in gold braided silks, sometimes riding atop colorful horse-pulled bandwagons.

North Carolinian Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, who became one of the leading blackface comedians on the minstrel circuit, recalled joining the Florida Blossom minstrel show in Greenville, South Carolina, as a young man and played the bass drum in the brass band:

Every day at 12 o’clock sharp, while the men was settin’ up the tent, we’d hold a parade through town… We’d hire some local kid… to lead the way carrying the American flag… In addition to the noon parade, after the show we’d walk a mile and half into the town again in the evening… and start playin’ some jazzy tunes.

In an era before mass entertainment, the sights and sounds of these bands, with their glistening horns and thundering drums, made quite an impression. “Saturday was a great day in the city and the streets were jammed at 4 p.m. when the colored minstrels had their parade,” the Laurens Advertiser reported when Davis was a small boy.

Davis’s first memory of hearing a guitar — that it sounded like “a brass band coming through” — is no idle quip. From his earliest years, he imagined the six-stringed instrument in his hands as capable of making the fantastic cacophony of sounds he heard from those rousing brass bands. That conception would help fuel his revolutionary approach to the guitar, not as a mere vocal accompaniment but as a band in a box with cornets, trombones, tubas, clarinets, and drums all at his disposal. Davis spoke a lot about the influence of pianists on his arrangements, going so far as to call his guitar “the piano around my neck.” But brass bands appear to have had an equally important role in the development of his style.

Brass bands performed at schools and in factory yards, and on the earliest 78 rpm recording they could be heard playing popular songs, Sousa marches, blues, and ragtime. Davis played all those genres on guitar, and the songs he heard traveling bands play would show up later in his own repertoire. In the fall of 1915, for instance, most of the brass bands on tour were performing the songs of William “King” Phillips, a cornetist whose composition “Florida Blues” Davis would teach to students but never record. During the same season, the brass bands were cutting their teeth on the latest sheet music hit of W. C. Handy, “Hesitating Blues,” a song Davis would make famous (as “Hesitation Blues”) for guitarists during the folk revival. Davis also would record several marches, including, most famously, “Soldier’s Drill,” which he derived in part from John Philip Sousa.

Playing his guitar night and day amid this fertile musical landscape, Davis began to attract the attention of whites in Laurens County, who invited the blind boy to entertain them at picnics. As Davis remembered, “The white people sometimes would come by and set a while with me to hear me play. They would make great expression and statements to my mother what success I would be able to have if she would give me over to them… They would give me money. And they would keep me off all day and feed me. Give me clothes.” He added in another interview: “The most I made at picnics sometimes was fifteen dollars. I thought that was money! After them get through eating, you understand, they’d rake up all the fragments, put them on a plate and bring me something to eat. I’d eat. That’s right.”

By the age of fourteen or fifteen, Davis was reportedly a good enough musician to play in a string band in the city of Greenville that included a virtuoso blind guitarist named Willie Walker, as well as two lead violins, a bass violin, and a mandolin. Black string bands were common throughout the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in addition to blues and ragtime, they played popular songs and country tunes, along with the square dances and set dances they performed for black and white functions. The Mississippi Sheiks, featuring guitarist Bo Carter and several of his brothers, epitomized the tradition with their Depression-era recordings.

It would have been great schooling for Davis to perform for both blacks and whites, in big halls as well as for small dances, country suppers, picnics, and the like. Versatility was the string band’s stock-intrade, and the variety of venues offered Davis an ideal opportunity to build a wide-ranging repertoire of blues, ragtime, country dance tunes, vaudeville and medicine show songs, ballads, and popular songs in addition to the spirituals he learned in church. Band members had to be able to play a slow waltz, a fast rag, or a square dance, depending on the mood or predilection of the audience. Vestiges of that versatility remained in Davis’s repertoire throughout his musical life, not only in the astonishing variety of tunes he could play but in how he could take a single song and render it in myriad ways, such as the three versions of “Candy Man” he knew, including one played in waltz time and another as a two-step dance.

Willie Walker loomed large in Davis’s memory. Years later in New York City, when Davis would pillory the skills of most professional guitarists, he would speak with some reverence about Walker. Like Davis, Walker used a fleet fingerpicking technique that’s come to be known as Piedmont-style guitar, named for the Appalachian foothills region of the East Coast that spans Georgia to New Jersey. The Piedmont style is marked by a steady, rhythmic alternating bass pattern — “boom-chick, boom-chick” — played by the thumb, while one or two other fingers pick a syncopated melody on the treble strings. It may have derived in part from old-time banjo picking, parlor guitar styles, and ragtime piano. Blind Blake, another influential blind guitarist who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s, was the Piedmont-style guitarist whom Davis admired most.

Unlike the dirgelike blues that came to be associated with the Mississippi Delta region, the Piedmont style is essentially dance music. But the name is a bit misleading, as related fingerpicking styles seem to have emerged elsewhere at around the same time. Mississippi John Hurt, who grew up around the Delta region and would first record in 1928, played in a similar fashion. And in Kentucky, a black guitarist named Arnold Shultz taught a thumb-based picking style later popularized by Merle Travis and now often called Travis picking. None of the other practitioners of the style, however, would rival Davis in the sheer complexity and variety of his compositions.

It’s possible Blind Willie Walker was a source for some of Gary Davis’s most celebrated ragtime guitar pieces. Davis himself called Walker a “guitar dog,” and the bluesman Josh White, who led Walker around in Greenville for a time, rated him the best guitarist he’d ever heard, even better than Blind Blake. But as to whether Walker taught Davis some of his songs, Davis gave conflicting accounts. Stefan Grossman, one of his later guitar students, recalls Davis on at least one occasion saying that he’d learned “Make Believe Stunt” (aka “Maple Leaf Rag”) and “Cincinnati Flow Rag” from Walker. But in a taped interview with Grossman around 1969, Davis said without hesitation, “I didn’t ever learn any of his pieces.” He added that “most I heard him play was the blues like ‘Crow Jane.’”

Walker died young of congenital syphilis, having only recorded four sides for Columbia records, two of which — “South Carolina Rag” and “Betty and Dupree” — were issued. While they reveal a superb guitarist, they don’t sound remotely like Davis and are nowhere near as intricate as Davis’s most groundbreaking arrangements. It’s impossible, of course, to assess Walker’s repertoire from a single 78, but the available evidence suggests that even if Davis learned “Make Believe Stunt” and “Cincinnati Flow Rag” from Walker, he rendered them in his own style. He always wore as a badge of pride the fact that he played the guitar like no one before him. “That’s my motto, not to bring out something somebody else had heard before,” Davis reflected years later. “I always did look to do things different than anybody else did.”

Davis eventually tired of splitting fifty dollars in earnings for a night’s work with five other musicians. He described Walker and the others as unambitious. “We would have got somewhere if I could have got them to come on and go with me, but you see I couldn’t get ’em nowhere.”

With his growing skills as a musician, however, Davis discovered that by picking the guitar he could get something perhaps even more important to him: positive attention, the kind his mother never gave him. In particular, he found the young ladies receptive to his talents. Joseph McLean, Davis’s adopted nephew, said many years later in New York: “When he was a young man in the South… he would walk down the road playing his guitar and the men would put their wives in the house!”

During the folk revival, Davis would often perform a virtuoso instrumental ragtime piece that he sometimes called “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing Guitar at the Same Time).” (It also was known as “The Twelve Sticks,” based on the Dozens, a traditional AfricanAmerican insult game featuring head-to-head taunts to determine who comes out on top.) Davis used the tune to mark his territory as the hottest player around on six strings. Introducing the song to audiences, he would explain that during his young days he’d learned to play his guitar one-handed while hugging a girl, pulling a fast one on her mother listening from the kitchen. It was a matter of survival. “Old folks’ll shoot your arm off they catch you huggin’ a girl,” Davis remembered. “You can kiss ’em but don’t hug ’em.”

Playing guitar one-handed became one of Davis’s signature moves later on as a street singer, the kind of skill that would turn heads and fill his tin cup with nickels and dimes. He once described the youthful origins of the technique, and while the story might have been embellished for maximum effect, it rings broadly true:

When I was coming up, you know, I was a courtin’ boy. The girl would follow the boy to the porch and kiss him… She wanted to hug him, well I did too… I went down in the woods by a pine tree and I tried some tricks to see if I could play my guitar right on and hug this pine tree! And I played the guitar with one hand and hug that pine tree. I said, ‘Now this here, this ought to work.’ This girl’s mother was crazy about music, didn’t care nothing about what it was… So when I got ready to hug her, you understand, that’s when the old woman done turned her head [away], I get a chance to hug her.

If Davis, by his late teens, was beginning to have real success as a musician, his family had other plans for him. On August 26, 1914, Davis, at 18, was enrolled at the South Carolina Institution for the Education of the Deaf and the Blind, located on a “healthful and pleasant site” in the town of Cedar Springs in neighboring Spartanburg County. The school was founded in 1849, but state officials shuttered it during Reconstruction when black students were ordered admitted, and later reopened it, keeping blacks segregated from whites.

Davis’s application was endorsed by his mother, now known as Evelina Cheek, who was then living in the town of Gray Court; she was illiterate, signing with an X. The other family member whose name appears on the application is that of Clay Martin of Laurens township — her father and Davis’s grandfather. “The parties herein concerned have no property returned for taxation in Laurens Co[unty],” the application noted, and Davis was admitted as a beneficiary pupil, unable to pay the $150 tuition for nine months. According to one account, a white southerner impressed with Davis’s guitar skills covered his fee, but the application provides no confirmation of this.

The year of Davis’s admission, the school’s superintendent, N. F. Walker, had successfully lobbied for a state constitutional amendment to reclassify the school from a “penal and charitable” institution to an educational one. “Every deaf and every blind child within the bounds of these United States has a right to hope for an education,” he’d written in an open letter to voters that ran in various South Carolina newspapers.

Still, though all the blind children, white and black, had classes in music (organ, piano, cornet, violin, and singing) as well as in physical education, they also spent up to three hours a day in industrial training to help prepare them for “useful citizenship.” For the girls that meant sewing, crocheting, bead work, basketry, and rug weaving; and for the boys, “broom, mat, mattress and brush making, chair seating and hammock weaving.”

For a musician of Davis’s caliber who clearly had ambitions beyond the “useful citizenship” being offered for blind youth, life at a boarding school must have seemed quite restrictive. Davis later said he learned to read New York Point, a precursor to Braille, at Cedar Springs. By some accounts, he taught music there, but since guitar wasn’t in the curriculum, in all likelihood the arrangement was an informal one, more like the one-on-one lessons he would become famous for in Durham and New York. In any event, he seems to have grown discontented rather quickly with the vocational training the school offered, leaving after only six months and returning to his family’s farm in Laurens County.

Asked about the school decades later, Davis said he didn’t like the food served there, but that may have been his way of saying that he wanted to make his own way in life, even with the decks stacked against him.