Abstract
Musician, teacher, and preacher, Reverend Gary Davis was a critical figure of the American Folk Music Revival. Due to the commercial success of many of his students as well as a large body of recorded music both sacred and secular, Davis’s repertoire, virtuosity, and influence can still be heard today. His musical range encompassed a swathe of popular, traditional, blues, and gospel tunes among other styles including Civil War marches, spirituals, and original compositions. Recently, music scholars and historians have begun to study Davis’s music, life, and legacy as a masterful musician, gifted musical educator, and torchbearer of a disappearing generation of southern folk artists and performers. Viewed as a central, but often-neglected figure of the time, these studies largely aim to place Davis’s legacy in its proper place among the American musical canon. Using these extensive studies on Davis’s legacy, this paper will analyze Davis’s use of sound and music as a central tool for his survival, focusing particularly on the ways in which he used music to foster a strong sense of identity and belonging. From his roots as a street musician in the Jim Crow south, through his time as an ordained minister and guitar teacher in New York City, Davis relied on the sonic world as a tool for dealing with his blindness. A life fraught with extreme circumstances, Davis constructed a fiercely independent identity that often blended between his life as a devout preacher and as a street singer and performer. Davis relied on music throughout his life to support himself financially, to provide himself comfort in frequent times of loneliness, and in order to foster a meaningful –largely musical -community of those who cared for him. Studying Davis through the theory of complex embodiment and the framework of Blacksound, this paper will contribute to the growing scholarship honoring Davis’s unique and impactful legacy as well as provide a case study in the significance of Black and blind musicians and street performers on popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Finally, this study will challenge hegemonic theories of the development of popular music in the United States. By studying Davis’s story, his music can shine a light on issues of equity and radical inclusion, lifting up the stories of those historically unheard.