Mac Davis, the Song Painter

On the auspicious debut of the singer-songwriter

One of the great things about Substack, and writing here, is the chance to do things that one wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. I suspect a 2,000-word essay on Mac Davis’ debut album would be a tough sell at any publication (it may even be a tough sell among some of you), but I’ve long loved Song Painter and have wanted to share why for a long time. There’s a deep sincerity to Davis and to his songs like ‘Memories,’ ‘In the Ghetto,’ ‘Watching Scotty Grow’ and ‘Don’t Cry Daddy.’ The highs are really high and the lows are about as low as they can be. Mac Davis was the real deal!

I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts as well.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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Mac Davis, the Song Painter
By: Robert C. Gilbert

What does it mean to be called a “song painter”? Perhaps it is related to the ability of a songwriter to not only make one feel but to also see, to be in the setting in which a song is situated. It’s a quality that I think links a group of singer-songwriters who rose to prominence in the late sixties and whose songs were seemingly recorded by everyone.

Mickey Newbury and Kris Kristofferson wrote often of desolate landscapes. Jerry Reed and Tony Joe White conjured riotous explosions of Southern colour. Jim Webb built song canvases of wide introspection. Mac Davis could be harder to pin down but it was he who was marked as the “song painter,” a sobriquet bestowed upon him by Glen Campbell.

In 1970, he recorded Davis’ ‘I’ll P:aint You a Song.’ There’s a lilt in the melody as Campbell sings, “But if you’ll close your eyes / and step inside my world / I’ll take you by the hand / we’ll find a brand new day.” It’s a song of promise, a pledge of release from troubles through the craft of songwriting but does not exactly speak of how Davis used his pen like a brush.

He did though when he wrote “of holding hands and wrapped bouquets / of twilights trimmed in purple haze / of laughing eyes and simple ways / and quiet nights and gentle days with you.” It’s the emotional centrepiece of the first verse of ‘Memories,’ written by Davis and Billy Strange for Elvis Presley, one of the first artists to connect with his songs (Presley recorded seven of them within 11 months, four of them were top 40 hits).

‘Memories’ is the linchpin of Presley’s 1968 NBC-TV special. He sings it to a pre-recorded backing track at the conclusion of the extended sequence where he appears in a boxing ring without the ropes with long-time bandmates Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana plus “Memphis Mafia” pals Charlie Hodge and Alan Fortas. Presley sits at the edge of the ring, fully clad in leather, sweaty and hair disheveled after playing old favourites and reminiscing about the halcyon days of the fifties, and begins to sing.

As the words pour out of him, using a sensitivity that was largely absent from the rest of the special as he sang as if his very life was on the line (it kind of was), the camera often situates him among those seated around him. They are all intently listening to Presley. The connection between the singer and his audience is palpable, a collective reflection of how Presley has marked the lives of all those moved by him and his music.

An even more interesting thing here is that he only sings the first verse of the song, lending enough ambiguity so that ‘Memories’ can be interpreted as either being sentimental or bittersweet or a combination of both. When Davis performed the song as part of a two-hour special broadcast in February 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of what is now known as the ’68 Comeback Special, he sang not only the first verse but the two that follow. It’s about the only worthwhile moment in what was otherwise an incoherent spectacle. In its complete form—the first verse in the past tense, the two that follow in the present tense—it becomes an expression of profound loss. Davis first recorded his version of ‘Memories’ for Song Painter, his debut album, released on Columbia in 1970.

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By then, Davis, a native of Lubbock, Texas, had been in the music business for almost a decade. He was a member of a group called the Zebs, which released two sings at the start of the sixties. He worked for Vee-Jay Records as well as at Liberty in the promotions department, also putting out a few stray singles that went nowhere. He then became a writer for Nancy Sinatra’s record label, Boots Enterprises. It was then that the songs began to pour out of Davis’ pen, sometimes written with Strange (in addition to ‘Memories,’ ‘A Little Less Conversation’) or Delaney Bramlett (‘Hello L.A., Goodbye Birmingham’) or under the pseudonym Scott Davis (‘Don’t Cry Daddy’) so that he wouldn’t be confused with Mack David of Disney fame and brother of Hal, or under his own name (‘Something’s Burning’).

In addition to writing songs for Sinatra, Davis also appeared as part of her stage show. He left her employ in 1970 and signed with Columbia. His first single for the label was ‘Whoever Finds This, I Love You,’ a portrait of a friendship struck between an old man and young orphan. The lyrics are sometimes too clever for their own good—for example, “as he read the childish writing / the old man began to cry / ’cause the words burned inside of him / like a brand”—but Davis sells them. There’s a comfort in hearing him sing them. His tone is full, direct and well-rounded. As he rises in the register, there’s a slight twang. During a recitation that deliver the song’s gut-punch resolution, his voice becomes rich and deep.

Surrounding him is a lush arrangement, heavy on the strings, by Artie Butler—among his many credits, he arranged both Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘What a Wonderful World’ and Janis Ian’s ‘Society’s Child.’ It gives ‘Whoever Finds This, I Love You’ a suitably autumnal sound that’s neither sugary nor saccharine.

The single was moderately successful commercially, reaching #53 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 13, 1970. A month earlier, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition just missed the top 10 with the mesmerizing ‘Something’s Burning’ with its alternating soft and hard sections—both fairly erotic—another example of Davis’ heighted expressionism. A corollary of it from a woman’s point of view was ‘I’m Just in Love,’ recorded by Sinatra in 1969. It tetters into melodrama but the melody Davis wrote is poignant, reaching upward on the resolution.

When Davis hit upon an idea—blissful love on ‘Something’s Burning’ or the plea of a child to his disconsolate father to “don’t cry daddy / daddy, please don’t cry” or a divorced dad admiringly calling his young son “daddy’s little man”—and built a song around it that said something about the ecstasy or pain of everyday life, it took and could shake the listener.

The latter, ‘Daddy’s Little Man,’ was one of several Davis songs that O.C. Smith, he of ‘Little Green Apples’ fame, recorded in the late sixties. It was his last 40 hit and was produced by Jerry Fuller, who also gained renown by steering the recordings of Gary Puckett & the Union Gap. Both Smith and Puckett sung orchestral pop and it was this sound that Fuller brought to Davis’ Song Painter as its producer.

‘Daddy’s Little Man’ leads off the album’s second side. The arrangement by Butler is sweet, tracing the ache of the main melodic line but staying out of the way for Davis’ voice to float along. His singing here is not light but it’s not solemn either. It lands resolutely on lines like, “my, you must have grown about a foot or two since last weekend,” to both emphasize the pleasant sound of Davis’ singing and the sadness of the song, a meditation on being a weekend parent.

From ‘Daddy’s Little Man,’ the album moves to ‘Once You Get Used To It’ which takes an alternate view of the same scenario. The melody Davis wrote is strong, naturally fitting his tendency to let a note linger. He starts it with this: “living all by yourself ain’t bad at all” and then pauses before drawing out “oh no” and then softly adding, deep in his register, “once you get used to it.” It’s a punch to the gut equaled by the song’s bridges; in particular, the second in which the protagonist, newly divorced, remarks on the perceptiveness of children. “’Cause sometimes other people’s kids / have a way of looking at you / they can tell with you it ain’t no game / they can see the pain.” When it is sung by Davis in full voice against Fuller and Butler’s lush production and arrangement, these words become a statement of radical empathy.

There’s no better example of that strain to Davis’ artistry than ‘In the Ghetto.’ What remains undiminished about the song 56 years after Presley recorded it and had his first top 10 hit in four years is the compactness of the words that Davis used to tell the song’s story. That wasn’t always the case.

In Presley’s hands, ‘In the Ghetto’ has an inevitability to what will happen to the young man who dies far too young and needlessly against a mostly martial beat. Davis took a different approach when he recorded it for Song Painter. The beat is consistent and straight. He sings more forcefully and in doing so, turns it into a requiem for the young man. Phrases like “and his mama cried,” “and his hunger burns” and “as her young man died” are stretched out and sear. Davis’ recording is, to be sure, more conventional than Presley’s but, even as I have been fervent in Elvis Presley fandom for 45 years and counting, I find Davis’ version more moving. The sincerity is overpowering.

It is too on ‘Home,’ Davis’ comment on the Vietnam War. Again, he focuses on an individual—a soldier—to comment on the waste of life. The arrangement is ornate with female background singers (the Shirley Matthews Singers), pizzicato strings and the rat-a-tat-tat of Gene Chrisman’s figure on Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto.’ Davis avoids any explicit political message but makes one anyway by showing, not telling, the larger point he wishes to make.

That is ultimately why Davis should be placed among the songwriters who rose to prominence in the late sixties—not simply because of the timing of his rise—like Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and Tony Joe White.

I would concede Davis’ poetry through song wasn’t as subtle or as literary-based as Kristofferson’s, but in his way, Davis could equally evoke loss that could knock down the manliest of men. He could tell of love that narrowly slipped out of one’s grasp, as Newbury could, on ‘Closest I Ever Got.’ He could also tell a Southern tale such as ‘Uncle Boogar and Byrdle Neale’ and ‘Hello L.A., Goodbye Birmingham’ like White could. All there were also on Song Painter and the last two showed how Davis could rock.

The album ends with ‘Half and Half (Song for Sarah)’—Sarah being Davis’s second wife who, in the dissolution of the marriage, took up with Glen Campbell—with its infectious “la la la” refrain. It’s a hopeful, harmonious song. The second verse is particularly noteworthy. It starts with, “Half the world is melody and half a song is words” and ends with “I can sing the words if you can hum the melody / together we can sing the song and that’s how it should be.” Sung by someone else, the message may be considered trite but when sung by Davis, it’s a message that one can easily get behind.

Song Painter is all but forgotten. At least in Canada, it’s unavailable for streaming. Someday, I hope that someone savvy will scoop up the rights to reissue it. It’s that good. On the album’s back cover, there are five quotes on the bottom right-hand corner to emphasize the mark Davis quickly made. Amid endorsements by O.C. Smith, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Frank Sinatra (“Not only does Mac Davis write great songs, but more than that, he sings them as well as anyone I’ve heard”), Nancy Sinatra writes of his songs, “there is a piece of [Davis] in every one of them”). Glen Campbell gets most to the point: “Mac Davis don’t write songs, he paints them.”