Miles Davis (1926–1991)

Miles Davis was one of the most prolific, innovative, and influential jazz musicians of all time. In addition to his unique trumpeting style, he played with other jazz legends and released such classics as Birth of the Cool, Sketches of Spain, and Kind of Blue. A native of Illinois who went on to international fame after relocating to New York City, Davis had strong Arkansas roots. Both of Davis’s parents were from Arkansas, and he credited his experiences in Arkansas with developing his unique sound and influencing recordings later in his career.

Miles Dewey Davis III was born on May 26, 1926, in Alton, Illinois. He grew up in nearby East St. Louis, located across the Mississippi River from the much larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis Jr., was from Noble Lake (Jefferson County), an unincorporated Arkansas community in the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area. His mother, Cleota (Cleo) Mae Henry, was also an Arkansas native.

Various dates have been given for Davis’s father’s birth. Some sources give May 22, 1900, though his death certificate shows it as May 14, 1903. Despite such genealogical fuzziness, it is clear that young Davis enjoyed a level of financial security denied to most African American people at the time. He credited his family’s success to his ancestors. In his autobiography, Davis said, “People in our family were special people—artists, business men, professionals, and musicians—who played for the plantation owners back in the old days before slavery was over.” Davis’s paternal grandfather, Miles Davis (1870–1943), was from Macon County, Georgia, and his paternal grandmother, Mary Frances Luster Davis (born January 1871 according to the 1900 census), was from Arkansas, though her parents were not.

Davis’s paternal grandfather was a farmer who never left Arkansas. He also worked as a bookkeeper for white and Black people in his community, although his bookkeeping skills apparently became threatening to whites who “didn’t care for his financial prowess.” Davis’s grandfather died in Pine Bluff and is buried there.

Davis came from an educated family. His father’s brother, Ferdinand, went to Harvard University. Davis’s father did not graduate from high school, but as was possible at the time, he enrolled in college anyway. He graduated from Arkansas Baptist College, then Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and finally from Northwestern University’s dental school. Davis’s father had a thriving dental practice, allowing young Davis to live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle and focus on a music career.

Davis described his mother as “beautiful and a good piano player”; she also played the violin. Her mother, Hattie, was from Arkansas. Davis’s mother graduated from Hickory Street High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1915 and was class salutatorian. According to the 1940 census, she graduated from a four-year college, though it is unclear which one. Before she met Davis’s father, she worked as a stenographer in a doctor’s office in Little Rock. Davis did not get along well with his mother and was not as curious about her family background as he was about his father’s. His mother, nevertheless, was an urbane woman who refused to cook or clean as women were expected to at the time. The family instead had a cook and maid. Davis credited his mother’s fondness for nice clothes and jewelry with his later obsession with fashion and dressing well.

Davis was the middle child in his household. His sister, Dorothy Mae, was born in 1925, and his brother, Vernon, was born in 1929. Davis’s parents eventually split up, and his father remarried in 1946. Young Davis would visit the farm during the summer with other family members. In his autobiography, Davis remembered a long train trip where he was given fried chicken to eat on the way to Arkansas. Rather than stretch out the meal, Davis ate it in a hurry and had to go hungry for the rest of the trip.

Davis enjoyed his trips to the Arkansas countryside, where he rode his grandfather’s horses. When he later moved to New York City to pursue a jazz career, one of the first things he did was ride a horse in Central Park.

In Arkansas, Davis said that he and his playmates would “catch fish all day long, buckets of them, tubs of them.” Davis was not averse to childhood mischief, like the time he smashed up a bunch of his grandfather’s watermelons. His grandfather punished him by not letting him ride a horse for a week. On the whole, however, Davis said that life on his grandfather’s farm was fun and that he would rise early and go to bed late to enjoy every minute of his vacation.

Davis was also transfixed by the music he heard in the countryside. His encounter with it is worth quoting in full:

We’d be walking on these dark country roads at night and all of a sudden this music would seem to come out of nowhere, out of them spooky-looking trees that everybody said ghosts lived in…somebody would be playing a guitar the way B. B. King plays. And I remember a man and woman singing and talking about getting down! Shit, that music was something, especially that woman singing. But I think that stuff stayed with me….That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern midwestern, rural sound and rhythm. I think it started getting into my blood on them spook-filled Arkansas back-roads after dark when the owls came out hooting. So when I started taking music lessons I might have already had some idea of what I wanted my music to sound like…. It’s hard to pinpoint where it all began for me. But I think some of it had to have started on that Arkansas road.

When composing his seminal 1959 work, Kind of Blue, one of the bestselling and most highly acclaimed jazz albums of all time, Davis apparently still had Arkansas on his mind. “I wrote this blues,” he said of the studio sessions, “that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road.”

Davis’s grandfather died in 1943 and is buried in Pine Bluff. His death likely put an end to Davis visiting relatives in Arkansas. Some members of the Davis family, however, still enjoyed rural life. Davis’s father’s success as a dentist allowed him to buy a farm in rural Illinois. Davis said that it was even bigger than his grandfather’s farm, and he rode horses there. His mother, however, did not enjoy country life. After she and Davis’s father divorced, she married a man named James Robinson. She died of cancer in a St. Louis hospital. Davis did not attend the funeral, though he had attended his father’s a few years before.

It is unclear if Davis visited Arkansas after he became famous. It is likely he had little interest in playing in segregated Arkansas in the 1950s or 1960s. Davis died on September 28, 1991, and is buried in the Bronx in New York City. His parents are buried in Illinois.

For additional information:
Cunningham, Jimmy, Jr., and Donna Cunningham. Delta Music and Film: Jefferson County and the Lowlands. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2015.

Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Colin Edward Woodward
Richmond, Virginia