Washita Love Child

Auteur
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. Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Poet Warrior. The recipient of the 2023 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Texte du rabat
No one played like Jesse Ed Davis. One of the most sought-after guitarists of the late 1960s and '70s, Davis appeared alongside the era's greatest stars-John Lennon and Mick Jagger, B.B. King and Bob Dylan-and contributed to dozens of major releases, including numerous top-ten albums and singles, and records by artists as distinct as Johnny Cash, Taj Mahal and Cher.

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.