Presley took In the Ghetto to No 3 on the US chart in 1969, with Don’t Cry Daddy reaching No 6 later the same year. Presley’s version of the resulting song, Memories, gave Davis his first Top 40 credit as a songwriter. “It shows you two things: the power of music and the power of Elvis,” Davis said.Įlvis liked the song so much that he asked Davis to write another for his 1968 comeback special on NBC TV.
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Decades later it enjoyed a second life after a remixed version featured in the movie Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and went on to top the singles charts in nine countries. He received a priceless boost when Presley, who had already hailed Davis as “one hell of a songwriter”, recorded A Little Less Conversation (a song Davis had originally intended for Aretha Franklin), which was included in the 1968 film Live a Little, Love a Little. He also performed frequently in her stage shows. He was subsequently hired as a staff writer by Nancy Sinatra’s fledgling publishing company B-n-B Music and was able to place his material with artists including Bobby Goldsboro, Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, OC Smith and Sinatra herself. In 1966 he became a plugger for Liberty’s music publishing division in Hollywood, trying to sell other writers’ songs while also slipping in demo recordings of his own material. Inspired by the example of Lubbock’s most famous son, Buddy Holly, whom he recalled seeing driving through Lubbock in a brand new black and pink Pontiac convertible, Davis angled to break into the music business and, after dabbling with a local Atlanta band, the Zots, he joined the Vee-Jay record company in 1961 before being hired as a regional manager for Liberty Records in 1965. He graduated from Lubbock high school aged 16, and left the city to move in with his mother in Atlanta, she having divorced and remarried. A keen football player, he often found himself involved in fist fights.
He described his father as “very religious, very strict and very stubborn”.
His father, a builder, owned an apartment complex called the College Courts, where Davis lived with his parents and sister, Linda. Among his long list of screen credits, Davis fans especially treasure his performance as a football quarterback (alongside Nick Nolte) in the movie North Dallas Forty (1979), and his role in the ABC sitcom Rodney (2004-06).īorn in Lubbock, Texas, he was the son of Edith (nee Lankford) and Thomas “TJ” Davis. He racked up a string of big hits on the US pop and country charts, including the chart-topper Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me (1972), Stop and Smell the Roses (1974), It’s Hard to Be Humble (1980) and Hooked on Music (1981), and was able to diversify into a successful acting career in television and films.
Davis’s compositions Memories and Don’t Cry Daddy would become regular staples of Presley’s concert performances in the 1970s.īut Davis, who has died aged 78, was also a noteworthy artist in his own right. Mac Davis’s name will always be associated with Elvis Presley, since Davis wrote Presley’s dramatic and politically charged 1969 comeback hit In the Ghetto, as well as A Little Less Conversation (a hit in 1968, and then a much bigger hit in a remixed version more than 30 years later).
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