Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis is the new biography from author Douglas K. Miller which examines the life of the Oklahoma-born musician who left his home state to become a dominant force within rock music in the 1970s. Davis played with Conway Twitty, amassed credits with three of the four Beatles, and became a favorite player of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, and others. It’s his unmistakable lead playing you hear on Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” and on some of the most foundational records in Taj Mahal’s broad discography.
Davis passed in 1988 at the age of 43 at a time when he appeared to have left behind his issues with addiction and was looking forward. He’d recorded some groundbreaking music with indigenous poet John Trudell, ultimately heard on the LP “AKA Grafitti Man,” which was recorded at Browne’s studio as he rallied for his onetime collaborator. Dylan was a vocal supporter of the initial cassette release that Davis and Trudell issued, declaring it the best album of 1986.
Washita Love Child arrives as there is renewed interest in Davis—an exhibit at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa titled “Natural Anthem” (with which Miller was also involved) opened in November and will remain at the center until April. In February, Browne and Taj Mahal will perform in Tulsa, celebrating Davis’ work.
Miller recently spoke with KMUW about the book (which features a foreword by Joy Harjo) and Davis’ continued appeal.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the genesis of this book?
I was sitting up in my living room one night listening to a Gene Clark called “White Light” that Jesse Ed Davis produced and he plays guitar all over it. I don’t know why but I just sat up for a moment and thought, “Why don’t I know anything about Jesse Ed Davis? I know something else about everybody else in my record collection, to the point of being a real student of classic rock music.” I had been hip to his name for a very long time, even going back to my very earliest memories in life, driving from Washington state where my father was in the army, back home to Illinois where I was born and then would grow up, driving home across the country, I remember listening to Jackson Browne’s first album along with a Bob Seger album and a Queen album. I’m saying album but these were cassettes that I’d fished out of the glove box of my mom and dad’s car.
I remember being late three or early four-years-old and studying these cassettes, which I would make a lifetime out of studying liner notes. So I’ve been hearing Jesse Ed Davis since the farthest back I can go in my memory, [from] his great guitar solo on “Doctor My Eyes” on that Jackson Browne album up until the recent past where I realized, “This guy’s all over my record collection, I don’t know anything about him.” I set out to find out something about him hoping I could at least make an article and then I ended up with more material than I could fit in the book.
The beginning of this book ties in with your previous book, “Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century” (2019) because Jesse Ed Davis’ family is an example of Native Americans who moved into the urban environment.
Absolutely. It did occur to me early on that Jesse Ed Davis could have been a subject in my first book. I’ve long been interested in Native American people who moved to major cities for work, education and social opportunities in the twentieth century, so much so that by 1980 over half of all indigenous people lived in urban areas. Now, in 2024, that number is closer to 80 percent. Jesse fits as a native person who moves to a big city, in this case, Los Angeles, from a city that’s also kind of big, Oklahoma City, which had 600,000 people by 1960 when he was a teenager in high school, so not a small town by any stretch, who moved to Los Angeles to try to break into the mainstream music business in Hollywood. And he succeeded. In that respect he kind of fits the profile of Native American subjects I’ve long been interested in.
His family is also notable because they are people who are very artistic, people who are, to use a term associated with the ‘80s, upwardly mobile.
I find that very interesting about them as well, so much so that the entire first chapter of my book is about his indigenous ancestors: Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Seminole, and Mvskoke people. The second chapter is just about his parents, his mom and dad. All of these figures that I talk about in the first two chapters are so extraordinary [that] they could sustain books of their own.
I’ve been guilty of this in the past, I’ll confess, when reading a music biography, [I’ll think], “Just get to the part where he’s playing with John Lennon!” Don’t skip over these early chapters because they go far I think in explaining the precedent that Jesse’s ancestors established for him to do extraordinary things with his talent. His family is filled with prominent medicine people and business leaders and tribal leaders and powwow dancers. His Kiowa grandfather was tribal chairman of the Kiowa Nation during the Great Depression. His mom had a very robust media profile as the daughter of the chief and she would travel everywhere from New York to Los Angeles and in between as a performer, like her son would do. His father was a World War II veteran and an award-winning painter in fine arts. His great, great Seminole grandmother was the first female chief of the Seminole Nation.
I could go on about the precedent that they established and the way that I think it both indicated to a young Jesse Ed Davis that his indigenous families did great things and that he could do great things too but as well he probably felt a lot of stress and a lot of pressure to match the examples that they set for him in what we would call an upwardly mobile indigenous family in the mid twentieth century. So much so that the Davis family was sort of a middle upper class family in Oklahoma City and kind of recognized as the hippest, sort of most progressive people in their neighborhood. And they’re Native American in a place where Native people in the popular American consciousness [were misunderstood, there was a thinking that], “Native people don’t belong here. Native people in the city? Isn’t that an anomaly?” No, and it never has been. Nevertheless, those kinds of attitudes were projected onto the Davis family, including Jesse himself.
There’s a confluence of music in Oklahoma and so much of it is rooted in dance. There are working people there. Working people are going to go out and have drinks and they’re going to want to do dance and if you’re a musician in the places where they’re drinking, you want to play music that encourages people to do that.
I think of hard working people who came, in most respects, from far away to be here, to try to create some sort of new life in difficult circumstances and in a tough environment. Or I think about some of Jesse’s Kiowa and Comanche ancestors who had been calling this area home for hundreds or thousands or years, depending on whom we’re talking about. Dancing people in terms of the labor and the release that comes from the music but also Jesse is a dancing person on the powwow circuit, growing up around Kiowa and Comanche and Cheyenne powwow dancers. His father was a powwow dancer and would take Jesse out to the dances. His Kiowa mother also was a powwow dancer. So Jesse grew up around that music and that style of dancing as well. I think when you put together all of the dancing that we might associate with Oklahoma and all the various forms of music, I think you get something extraordinary with Jesse in terms of his musicality.
One of the most striking things to me is how much the people he worked with, the friends he made through music, love him. Sometimes you encounter people who had struggles and their colleagues will say, “They were talented but I had to divorce myself from them at some point.” I don’t get that sense from those who knew and worked with Jesse.
One of the great challenges in writing this book was how to manage some of the darker dimensions of his story. Going into this, I realized that there wasn’t much out there about Jesse Ed Davis, we didn’t know much about [him]. Maybe the worst thing I could do when writing the book was to be dishonest about him. If I were to make the first long form statement about his career and his legacy, I wanted to tell all of the story.
Part of that is that for many years Jesse was unwell. He struggled with the disease of addiction. In the book, I try to contextualize that and I try to be very sympathetic to it. In fact, I use those terms: I’ll say, “He’s unhealthy,” or “He’s unwell,” or “Jesse is sick now.” I agree that one of the remarkable things is the extent to which his friends and music peers really reached out to him and tried to help sustain him and bring health to him and give him new opportunities to get his career back on track and to get his health back on track.
In working on the book, I really experienced that theme firsthand because so many people showed up for this book. All of the people who granted me interviews for the book and who were so gracious, they want his story to be told. They all agree that this is someone who never quite got his due, but boy did he work for it. He really earned it. The enthusiasm for supporting Jesse’s legacy and story now is extraordinary. I only wish Jesse were here to see the love that he experiences.
