No one played like Jesse Ed Davis. As frontman, sideman, guitarist, pianist, producer, bandleader, and more, the multi-talented musician recorded or appeared with more than one hundred major artists, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Taj Mahal, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Emmylou Harris, Leon Russell, Harry Nilsson, Leonard Cohen, Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker, Cher, Gene Clark, Arlo Guthrie, and too many others to list here. In addition to making three solo albums during the early 1970s, he became one of the most sought-after guitarists in Hollywood, contributing to over one hundred major releases, including eight top-ten albums, seven top-ten singles, and dozens more top-twenty and top-forty records. “My discography would be as long as my arm, probably,” he said. That was an understatement.
By age twenty-five, Jesse was already beloved among guitar players by virtue of his work with Taj Mahal. Covering guitar, piano, organ, horn arrangements, and even handwritten album notes, Jesse was such an instrumental force that Taj sometimes called their group the Davis Band. It was specifically Jesse’s scorching slide guitar on Taj Mahal’s version of “Statesboro Blues” that inspired Duane Allman to adopt the technique, long before the latter became widely regarded as the greatest bottleneck slide player in the world with the Allman Brothers Band.
That’s Jesse’s spirited electric guitar solo on Jackson Browne’s first top-ten hit “Doctor My Eyes.” Those are Jesse’s seductive acoustic guitar licks on Rod Stewart’s sultry number-one hit “Tonight’s the Night.” In 1973, Mick Jagger had Jesse waiting in Los Angeles with his bags packed, ready to fill Keith Richards’s spot on a Rolling Stones tour, before Keith escaped a twenty-five-count drug bust in the nick of time. “Jesse’s music? Those are my roots,” testifies guitarist Elliot Easton, whose group the Cars topped the music charts for a decade. In a rare interview, Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green adds, “I tell you who I like a lot and that’s Jesse Ed Davis.” “Indian Ed’ll lay more guitar on you than any of them blues guitar people you can name,” taunted cosmic cowboy Gram Parsons. “Indian Ed is the cream of the crop; he’s better than Clapton and Hendrix put together.”
Such accolades and endorsements alone merit serious attention, but then his story merits a book. Jesse Edwin Davis III was born in Oklahoma in 1944 to a family that was practically nobility in its community. Like a million other kids from his generation, he dreamed of becoming a rock and roll star after seeing Elvis Presley. When attempts at college and military service failed, he split for California and soon found himself playing with the biggest rock stars in the world. Before long, however, Jesse was swept into a rising tide of debilitating drug addiction. Ten years later, he began orchestrating a comeback after joining forces with a powerful poet he sang about long before they ever met, only for their formidable partnership to end prematurely. Everything moved too fast, with a strange collage of characters and subjects—including Johnny Cash, the Beatles, Little Richard, Andy Warhol, Bob Hope, Gary Busey, the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Kiowa Six, the Stanford Seven, John Lennon’s assassin, and an Aquarian cult— marking his days and nights. And if this inspires skepticism, these are only the greatest hits.
To be fair, Jesse sometimes undermined his own credibility. He was prone to self-mythologizing. Did he really play on the Monkees’ hit “Last Train to Clarksville”? “Oh no,” laughs the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith. “I’ve heard it was everyone from Jesse Ed to Charles Manson.” Jesse didn’t need to embellish his résumé. The reality was far more impressive. But then, Jesse didn’t move to California for the fact; he went there for the fiction.
Jesse Ed Davis wasn’t your average rock star. Though he performed poorly as an English major at university, he loved reading. He displayed an impressive vocabulary and impeccable penmanship. His knowledge was intimidating. “Have a good day and learn things,” he recited daily. To date, he’s the only musician I’ve heard refer to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from the stage. Other favorites included his Kiowa cousin N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, Dashiell Hammett detective novels, roguish Hollywood star Errol Flynn’s autobiography, and Ross Russell’s magisterial biography of Charlie Parker. Jesse was especially intrigued by Parker’s redheaded Jewish trumpeter Red Rodney, who, in terms of his ethnicity, seemed dissonant in a music world where he was known as “Albino Red.” He became hooked on heroin, not unlike Jesse himself.
To Jesse, the meaning of life was simple: eat good food, play good music, and have fun. His song “Every Night Is Saturday Night” wasn’t just a party tune; it was a serious personal philosophy, though it sometimes became reckless. “I made too much money too soon, and too young,” he once observed. Jesse was a quintessential Virgo: hardworking, but equally hard on those around him. He subjected himself and others to abrupt pivots between wanting to feel as intensely as possible and not wanting to feel at all. “There’s just a darkness in me,” he confessed to friends when they tried to help. “Being an artist,” he said, “you have to feel deeply. You have to feel more deeply than your average person. You have to feel more deeply to even want to be an artist.”
Jesse was indeed an artist, but he was also a man of many contradictions. He knew his talent, but he was insecure. He was an innovator who championed tradition; he loved Christmas and simple pleasures like beaches and amusement parks. He could talk on the phone for hours, but then disappear for days. He went out of his way to help friends, but he also hustled them. He produced a large network of musicians, but he compartmentalized his life. He was proud of who he was, but his omnipresent mirrored sunglasses made it seem like he wanted to hide or disguise himself. He was physically imposing, but his humor was disarming—his smile was a song unto itself.
Jesse Ed Davis was also Native American. Though Jesse himself insisted on being understood first as a musician, then as a Native American musician, the fact of his Indigeneity makes his life and legacy all the more compelling and important, especially given how few Indigenous artists have reached his level of influence, recognition, and success. In a century often portrayed as a period of ongoing distress and decline for Native people, Jesse and his Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Mvskoke, and Seminole ancestors from Oklahoma exemplified new possibilities for Native Americans. They prevailed through creativity and persistence. While speaking the language of sovereignty and self-determination, Jesse and his kin exercised power and shaped their worlds through renewed modes of cultural production and collaboration, as well as renewed labor and professional opportunities, including sports, religion, science, art, education, politics, medicine, acting, and finally, music.
From his first major gig supporting chart-topping rockabilly and country artist Conway Twitty, through European tours with Taj Mahal, George Harrison’s 1971 all-star Concert for Bangladesh, and an arena tour with Rod Stewart and the Faces, Jesse appeared on some of the biggest stages in the world, from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York to England, Germany, and France. At a time when few other Native American musicians appeared on concert stages, radio waves, and record store walls, Jesse achieved monumental visibility and audibility. In both Hollywood studios and the courts of British rock royalty, Jesse Indigenized the transatlantic crosscurrents of popular music in the late twentieth century, and even cocreated an altogether new style of Indigenous music. If not exactly a diplomat, Jesse was no mascot or sojourner. He was a producer, insider, and key collaborator.
Whereas twentieth-century Native American history is often presented as a policy narrative emphasizing American Indians as colonized people subject to federal assimilation campaigns, I instead position Jesse’s story as a cultural narrative—one that portrays him more as an Indigenous person than an Indigenous object. In the 1960s and ’70s, Native people typically only appeared in national media through the lens of Red Power activism. The significance of groups such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), which flourished during Jesse’s commercial peak, cannot and should not be understated in the collective fight for self-determination in education, health care, child welfare, environmental protection, and more. But Jesse’s music was more of an ally than an adversary or alternative to those causes. His music projected an equally important expression of Indigenous humanity through artistry.
If Jesse sang less about American Indian people than many contemporary white artists, it was because he didn’t need to. Jesse’s mere existence was subversive, both offstage—in an industry where Native workers and artists were once foundational—and onstage, where a generation of young music fans could see Native people were still here, precisely when the bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) implicitly suggested otherwise. Though his fame never surpassed that of Native musicians such as Jimi Hendrix or Robbie Robertson, who achieved greater commercial success, Jesse’s total range, the sheer volume and diversity of his work, extended much further.
Though lacking a large cohort in popular music, Jesse belonged to a generation of Native leaders and luminaries in different areas who challenged conventional wisdom about how and where Native people could fit in postwar America. These included political activists and leaders such as Wilma Mankiller, Dennis Banks, LaDonna Harris, and Winona LaDuke; writers such as Joy Harjo, Vine Deloria Jr., and N. Scott Momaday; and artists and entertainers such as T. C. Cannon, Charlie Hill, and Wes Studi, many of whom Jesse knew personally.
Even so, given his remarkable success as an Indigenous rock star, it’s tempting to conclude that Jesse is exceptional as a historical subject. In fact, he is representative in ways previous histories have intentionally or unwittingly foreclosed. Perhaps one reason Jesse isn’t better remembered is that the general public has been conditioned to think of Native Americans in the late twentieth century in injurious stereotypes. Jesse’s experience in Los Angeles as a self-described “urban Indian” did not inevitably become a story of skid row and dislocation. Instead, his experience speaks to a larger theme of Indigenous mobility and ingenuity. Similarly, his music calls for integration and cultural exchange rather than separation and protest. Jesse was more of an interlocutor than a Red Power activist.
Jesse nevertheless rose to fame in the context of the Red Power era. In 1969, when John Trudell and Indians of All Tribes claimed Alcatraz Island, Jesse was an emergent guitarist backing Taj Mahal. When the occupation ended in 1971, Jesse’s first solo album hit shelves. His second solo album corresponded with the Bureau of Indian Affairs takeover in Washington, DC, in 1972. In 1973, his jubilant third solo album appeared while Native people were dodging bullets at Wounded Knee. With friends in high places and major album and production deals, Jesse could have provided the soundtrack to Red Power. We might wonder why he didn’t. In the end, we might consider whether anyone really could.
The music Jesse made wasn’t so much a national anthem as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty but a “Natural Anthem,” the title of an instrumental tune from his third solo album, as an expression of Indigenous culture. “Jesse spoke through his guitar and his demeanor,” suggests Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne. In doing so, Jesse created a soundtrack for a different kind of Indigenous takeover that emerged out of twenty years of urban relocation, the racialization of Native people as a minority group within Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, a federal shift to a tribal self-determination policy, and an expanding generation of young Indigenous people who attended college and broke into the American middle class and mainstream media consciousness. Jesse’s lyrics and music illuminated a still largely unfamiliar set of Indigenous experiences, ones that were a little more Saturday night in the city than Monday morning on the rez and filled with a little more joy than pain.
For Jesse, the world of music promised a retreat from the world of Oklahoma, where being Indian shaped almost everything about his life. At the same time, the music industry in the 1960s and ’70s was a place where being Indian could come into relief in unpredictable, sometimes undesirable, ways. It presented a danger in that it could become an inescapable persona or caricature, to say nothing of possible discrimination and violence. Jesse’s studio collaborator Van Dyke Parks held that the fact of his Indigeneity was more foundational than final. Jesse’s power both emerged from and transcended his background. “Jesse Ed had all of that, the mystery of empire and the progress of [a] prophet,” Parks recalls. “Yes, he wanted to survive, he needed a meal, but he was beyond that. He was greater than his opportunity. . . . I knew immediately when I met Jesse Ed [that] he was a charismatic man, that is, you felt you were in touch with someone who knew God.”
Many former bandmates remember Jesse as the first Native person they ever met. Some of the very same people who insist that Jesse’s Indigeneity was immaterial among socially enlightened artists would sometimes seamlessly pivot to mention of Jesse’s Native features—a “fierce” expression, like his Comanche ancestors, or his beautiful black hair. New acquaintances called him “Indian Ed” or “Chief Davis.” The nicknames were conceived in affection, but Jesse desperately “wanted to be a part of this other world where that shit doesn’t matter,” stresses his Mohawk friend and early guitar influence Robbie Robertson. “The biggest obstacle that Jesse had to deal with was being an Indian,” adds Jesse’s Dakota music partner John Trudell.
That is to say, Jesse had to protect himself. His pride in being Indigenous was never in doubt. He knew about his peoples’ pasts and how he fit within their ongoing stories. He didn’t have to discover or rediscover himself: Jesse was born Indian, on the banks of the Washita River, in a Kiowa-Comanche tipi, as he told it. It’s more than a narrative device when I demonstrate his numerous name changes across the following pages. Indeed, many Native cultures practice name changes that signify new stages of experience and maturity. “Snookie” became Eddie, who became Ed, before he finally settled on his birth name, his father’s name. Jesse went to California to become Jesse, who was first and foremost an authentic bluesman and rock and roller. That’s how he wanted to be remembered.
What made Jesse an exceptional talent, in so many words, was an extension of the person playing the guitar. His sound reflected his spirit: playful, slightly dangerous, and always full of life. He played with a soft touch in his picking hand. His right-hand rhythm was especially fluid as he balanced his subtle attack with a cranked amplifier that made his guitar extra responsive. Playing his volume and tone knobs like instruments unto themselves, he searched for the best possible placement of each note within a song’s chordal spectrum. His slide guitar technique only expanded his tonal palette, affording him a broad dynamic in terms of volume, color, and sound. Now contrast his left hand, which played strongly on the neck and fretboard. In these respects—forceful left hand, sympathetic right hand—Jesse approached the guitar more like a piano, his first instrument.
In fact, Jesse derived significant influence from musicians who didn’t play guitar, citing blues pianist Otis Spann as his overall greatest influence. (Conversely, Jesse once suggested his favorite guitar player was saxophonist Junior Walker.) Jesse embraced a diversity in his playing that reflected the multitude of settings he experienced, particularly in the geographical and cultural crossroads of Oklahoma. Indeed, his string bends were so muscular that they occasionally slipped into a shade of bluesy dissonance with a forceful imprecision that allowed his funky character to come through. With an idiosyncratic command of his guitar, Jesse liked to work quickly and encouraged producers to keep his and his bandmates’ mistakes when their mistakes demonstrated soul. For Jesse, soul was more important than perfection.
As a hybrid rhythm and lead player, Jesse prioritized enhancing a song’s effect without confusing or overwhelming its essence. He was a minimalist who focused on melody, an approach borrowed from the early rock and roll 45s he listened to in Oklahoma, in which the guitar was still a rhythm instrument that set the spine of a song. This characteristic talent made him especially attractive to British musicians who grew up listening to those same 45s, often left behind by American soldiers before they returned home after World War II. As kids, many famous British musicians dreamed about America, and what’s more American than a Native American?
Jesse stood out among guitarists in his selectiveness with notes. He wasn’t afraid to hang back if he didn’t think he could improve what was already happening inside a song. “When he played and I played drums behind him it just sounded like the real shit,” says Jim Keltner, who played more sessions with Jesse than any other musician. Keltner considers Jesse one of two true geniuses he worked with, the other being jazz legend Albert Stinson, who also died from heroin addiction. Guitarists Bonnie Raitt and Bob Britt both describe Jesse in just one word: badass.
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Answering the phone in his Los Angeles apartment in 1986, decades after leaving home in Oklahoma City, Jesse Ed Davis was anxious to share some news with the caller. “My ship has come in,” he beamed. “I got sixty acres that’s come down from the Kiowa,” his mother’s tribe. “As luck would have it, I don’t know if you know any legends of the old General George Armstrong Custer, but there was an old thing that went down called the Washita Massacre,” he explained. Jesse’s sixty acres included a ridge in the flood plain overlooking the site of the massacre. “I didn’t know that until a few days ago,” he added.
But Jesse had always known stories about what happened to his Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne people in the Washita country, including the murder of many women and children in 1868. He also knew about his Seminole and Mvskoke ancestors who fought to defend their homelands in the southeastern United States before being marched at gunpoint to Indian Territory during the 1830s.
“I’m fixing to move back to Oklahoma,” Jesse announced to the caller. He was on a comeback trail, after all, making new music with Native artists, attending powwows, thinking about dancing again, and planning to enter the sweat lodge. At night, he dreamed about a life playing guitar in a little café on an Indian reservation, or moving into an old mansion on a hill back in Oklahoma. Alas, as his friend Bob Dylan once sang, “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” Although, maybe that isn’t exactly true. Perhaps Jesse had his own thoughts on the matter. “Keep me coming, back again,” he sang.
Excerpted from "Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis" by Douglas K. Miller. Copyright © 2025 by Douglas Kent Miller. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
