Billie Davis

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For the madam, see Kristin Davis (prostitute)

Billie Davis
Billie Davis (Tell Him - The Decca Years, 2005)
Background information
Birth name	Carol Hedges
Born	December 22, 1945 (1945-12-22) (age 62)Woking, Surrey, England
Origin	London, England
Genre(s)	Pop
Occupation(s)	singer
Years active	1960s
Label(s)	Decca

Billie Davis (born 1945) is a British female singer of the 1960s, who is probably best remembered for the British "hit" version of the song Tell Him in 1963 and a minor hit, I Want You to Be My Baby, in 1968.

Contents 1 Early career 1.1 Tell Him 2 Setbacks 3 Style 4 Late sixties and beyond 5 Notes

[edit] Early career

Billie Davis was born Carol Hedges in Woking, Surrey on 22 December 1945. Her first name was probably chosen because she was born three days before Christmas. Her performing name was apparently suggested by impresario Robert Stigwood and was derived from those of blues singer Billie Holiday and the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. ^[1].

In her teens Carol Hedges was an engineering secretary before she started her recording career. After winning a talent contest in which she was backed by Cliff Bennett's band, the Rebel Rousers ^[2], she cut some early demonstration records with the Tornados for producer Joe Meek. However, her first commercial success, under Stigwood's guidance, was Will I What?, released in August 1962 ^[3], on which she performed as a foil to Mike Sarne, rather as Wendy Richard had done on Sarne's chart-topping Come Outside. This reached number 18 in the British sales charts in September 1962 ^[4].

[edit] Tell Him

In February 1963 Davis had her biggest success with an infectious "cover" version of the Exciters’ Tell Him, a song by Bert Russell (sometimes known as Bert Berns) that was successfully revived in the late 1990s by Vonda Shepard (born, coincidentally, in 1963) for the American FOX television series Ally McBeal. Davis' recording reached number ten in the British charts and was followed by He’s the One which just crept into the "top 40" in May 1963 ^[5].

[edit] Setbacks

In 1963, the year in which popular music was transformed by the rise of the Beatles, Davis left Decca records, with which she had had some financial disagreements. In September of that year, returning from a concert in Worcester ^[6], she suffered a broken jaw in a road crash in the West Midlands in which Jet Harris, former guitarist of the Shadows, received head injuries. The reporting in the press of her association with Harris, a married man, earned Davis, still only 17, some unwelcome publicity at a difficult time and may have been one of the factors which held back her career. Despite the high regard in which many held her as a performer, she never achieved the fame of such contemporaries as Cilla Black or Sandie Shaw.

[edit] Style

Davis was an early propopent of many of the fashion styles for which the 1960s are remembered: bobbed hair, long boots of the kind popularised by Honor Blackman in early episodes of The Avengers and leather mini-skirts. She was said to have beaten the latter for “percussive effect” when recording ^[7]. The biographer of the "supergroup" Cream has described her as "astonishingly photogenic" ^[8].

[edit] Late sixties and beyond

Returning to Decca in the late 1960s Davis made some fine recordings, including of Chip Taylor's Angel of the Morning, on which she was backed by, among others, Kiki Dee and P. P. Arnold, who recorded the song herself and had the bigger hit in 1968. Davis' final "chart" entry was a Northern soul version of Jon Hendricks' I Want You to Be My Baby, originally recorded by Louis Jordan in 1952, which reached only number 33 in October 1968 ^[9], although sales were affected by an industrial dispute at the manufacturing plant ^[10]. This record was still played quite often on British radio stations in the 21st century.

Davis left Decca in 1970, but continued to record into the 1980s and was popular, in particular, with audiences in the Spanish-speaking world. In 2006 she was re-united with Jet Harris for a series for concerts. A retrospective collection of her recordings for Decca was released in 2005 ^[11].

[edit] Notes