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xi Preface Some time ago a British jazz critic who probably didn’t know better criticized the reissue of a Charlie Ventura album in a jazz magazine that should have known better, on the grounds that Ventura was not a “great.” The same forces that led me to reissue a very pleasant Charlie Ventura album led me to write this book. The music world is made up mostly of people who are not in themselves “great” but who enable “greats” to emerge. For every new book on Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong we need one on the scene that enabled them to be “great.” The New York jazz scene has been well portrayed for many years in Sam Charters’s and Len Kunstadt’s book, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), but you will search there without success for reference to Joseph M. Davis. The same oversight plagues other, more recent, books about vernacular music in New York City, such as Tony Fletcher’s All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927–77 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). It is perhaps not my place to assess if he should have been included, but I have taken it upon myself to make available in this book some of the material I have uncovered about him in the hope that someone else does that. Unaware that Joe Davis had died the previous year, I first made contact with his daughter Lucille Davis Bell in 1979, in order to release sides by Gabriel Brown for my Flyright label. This initial deal resulted in a number of albums of Davis-released material, by which time it had become apparent that his estate contained previously unreleased takes among his materials, as well as file data and photographs. I paid my first visit to Texas in 1982 to find a veritable treasure trove of materials, and soon became fascinated by this man of whom I’d heard little but who had been so involved with “my” music for years. His daughter received the suggestion of a book about him with cooperation and delight. She could not have been more helpful, for I was allowed complete access to her father’s files. One evening at her dinner table, her husband, Morton Bell, asked me if I’d ever met Joe Davis, whom he had known for many years. I replied that I hadn’t xii Preface but, having spent so much time releasing his material and researching his work, I actually felt that I knew him. Smiling, he asked me what sort of a man I thought Joe Davis had been. When I’d finished, the smile had gone and he looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “You really did know him.” I’d like to think that I have come close and that some of that understanding is transmitted from this book. The danger of working closely on one tree is that one loses sense of the forest. I’ve tried to avoid that by placing Davis in his own setting from basically his own materials. Some of what he retained must have been important to him; some seems important to me, but might have been more or less so to him. We will never know now. I’ve tried to keep in mind that people of varied interests might wish to know more about him; most of these will be interested in Davis’s involvement with blues, jazz, Fats Waller, or rhythm ’n’ blues. Possibly someone wished to know about his Spanish recordings, but no one asked. My research findings have been far from complete. Huge gaps existed in his files and his scrapbooks were sporadic and left out whole years (and decades later on). I could have spent weeks plowing through his files and those of the Library of Congress and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to find out the titles of all his published songs, and—possibly—when they were discarded. It seemed neither sensible nor affordable nor practical. I wanted to write a book that might whet an appetite or two and perhaps prod someone else with specialist knowledge to set it in print. The assessment of what might or might not have been important is a very personal matter. Some information is missing because I simply have none. Storyville magazine once asked in an editorial if people who had information on...

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