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.