Washita Love Child
ByPublisher Description
Kirkus Reviews • Best Books of 2024 [Nonfiction]
“I first met Jesse Ed Davis in the late ’80s. . . . [He was a] gentle yet intensely present giant who was a legend of an artist. . . . In Washita Love Child, Jesse Ed Davis is resurrected in story.”
—Joy Harjo, from the foreword
But Davis, whose name has nearly disappeared from the annals of rock and roll history, was more than just the most versatile session guitarist of the decade. A multitalented musician who paired bright flourishes with soulful melodies, Davis transformed our idea of what rock music could be and, crucially, who could make it. At a time when few other Indigenous artists appeared on concert stages, radio waves, or record store walls, in a century often depicted as a period of decline for Native Americans, Davis and his Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Seminole, and Mvskoke relatives demonstrated new possibilities for Native people.
Weaving together more than a hundred interviews with Davis’s bandmates, family members, friends, and peers—among them Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Robbie Robertson—Washita Love Child powerfully reconstructs Davis’s extraordinary life and career, taking us from his childhood in Oklahoma to his first major gig backing rockabilly star Conway Twitty, and from his dramatic performance at George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh to his years with John Trudell and the Grafitti Man band. In Davis’s story, a post-Beatles Lennon especially emerges as a kindred soul and creative partner. Yet Davis never fully recovered from Lennon’s sudden passing, meeting his own tragic demise just eight years later.
With a foreword by former poet laureate Joy Harjo, who collaborated with Davis near the end of his life, Washita Love Child thoroughly and finally restores the “red dirt boogie brother” to his rightful place in rock history, cementing his legacy for generations to come.
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About Douglas K. Miller
A professor of history at Oklahoma State University and a former working musician, Douglas Miller specializes in twentieth-century Native American history. He is the author of Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century. He lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Other books by Douglas K. Miller
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