Jacquea Mae doesn’t try to reproduce the feral growl on the original 1973 version of “If I'm In Luck, I Might Get Picked Up.” Betty Davis is almost impossible to do.
Instead, the soulful singer does her own thing on a pop-metal cover of the racy funk song just released by the Pittsburgh band Nash.V.ILL.
“It's us tipping our hat to her for being a trailblazer for women in music who never really got her due,” says guitarist Byron Nash. “We are celebrating her for Black History Month with this single.”
Davis, dubbed The Queen of Funk, was born in North Carolina and spent some of her formative years in Homestead before leaving for New York, where she launched a modeling and music career with a few singles in the mid ’60s. Her career escalated upon meeting and collaborating with Miles Davis, whom she briefly married. Although she stayed under the mainstream radar, her early ’70s albums “They Say I'm Different” and “Nasty Gal” are considered to be seminal funk records.
Davis abruptly halted her career in the late ’70s and moved back to Homestead in 1980 to live a quiet life. In 2019, she released a single, “A Little Bit Hot Tonight,” performed and sung by her friend, Danielle Maggio. Davis died of cancer in February 2022.
Prior to that, in May 2018, Mae played a tribute show for Davis at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, with Funk House, Davis’ original band, as part of an event for the screening of the documentary “They Say I'm Different.” Davis was so impressed by the performance she sent Mae a card with $300, which Mae put toward her first international performance, at the Lausanne Afro-Fusion Festival in Switzerland, in July 2019.
In October 2023, Nash.V. ILL played the WYEP Hellbender Ball at Thunderbird Music Hall as the Betty Davis band.
“It really made us dive deeper into her music,” Nash says. “We’ve been playing that song in every set ever since. Then I realized she was really the first super overly sexual woman in the ’70s and the labels weren’t sure what to do with it. So it’s the beginning of the Beyoncé and Rihanna energy from a Black woman in music.”
First Published: February 11, 2025, 10:30 a.m.
Updated: February 12, 2025, 1:52 p.m.
