Betty Davis has died, aged 77, and the world just got a little less funky. By rights, she should be a legend. Davis was a funk powerhouse who dressed like a sci-fi couture model and marshalled deep, raunchy grooves with bold female sexuality.

She was a pioneering black fashion model in the Sixties, a bravura songwriter, raunchy singer and daringly inventive producer whose fiery, short-lived marriage to Miles Davis helped bridge the gap between jazz, rock and soul. A pioneer of sexed up, feminist Afrofuturism on such sensational albums as They Say I’m Different (1974) and Nasty Girl (1975), Davis laid the groundwork for Madonna and Grace Jones and remains a clear influence on such contemporary divas as Peaches and Janelle Monáe. Betty wrote and produced her own material, her erotic grooves predating Rick James and Prince, both huge admirers. 

But though revered by aficionados, Davis never achieved a commercial breakthrough. Being deemed too rude for radio didn’t help. She released three fantastic albums between 1973 and 1975 before dropping out of the music business and off the map. Suffering from mental health issues, she lived out the rest of her years in obscure anonymity in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh where she had lived as a child. In a rare interview in 2017, she said: “When I was told that it was over, I just accepted it. And nobody else was knocking on my door.”

Yet such was the power of Davis’s music, it gained a cult following over her years of silence, with independent label Light in the Attic doing much to rehabilitate funk’s great lost diva. A 2017 documentary, Betty Davis: They Said I Was Different told her remarkable story. Always an adventurous, socially precocious and artistically minded girl, the 17-year-old then known as Betty Mabry enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which she would graduate from with a fashion degree. 

She became one of the first black models to be featured in Glamour and Seventeen magazines, and walked catwalks for designers including Halston, Betsey Johnson, Norma Kamali and Stephen Burrows. She began running her own club nights, befriending Andy Warhol and championing Jimi Hendrix, with whom she became close. She was also friends with Eric Clapton but turned down his offer to produce a record for her, judging that it would be “too banal”.