Joe Davis

Joseph M. Davis (October 6, 1896 – September 3, 1978) was an American music producer, publisher and promoter in jazz, rhythm and blues and pop music. Life and career Joe Davis was born in New York City. In the late 1910s and 1920s, he worked as a songwriter and singer who recorded for Columbia Records. In the mid-1920s, he had been responsible for placing dozens of blues and pop singers under his management with major and minor labels, while pursuing a radio and recording career as "Joe Davis, The Melody Man" and operating Triangle Music Publishing Co., which was founded in 1919 with the help of George F. Briegel (1890–1968). He has to be considered as an important influence for Fats Waller, having actually talked the shy, reluctant Waller into considering a performing career. Davis pushed Waller to compose seriously for the piano (as "African Ripples" 1931). Davis' name was found as 'songwriter' of Waller songs such as "Alligator Crawl" (1927) and "Our Love Was Meant To Be", also the Andy Razaf titles "Alexander's Back in Town" and "After I've Spent My Best Years on You". Davis managed to cheat Razaf out of royalties to "S'posin'", which was written to Paul Denniker's music. As a publisher, Davis worked with Porter Grainger ("Wylie Avenue Blues", 1927), Howard Johnson ("Florida Flo"), Chris Smith, Alex Hill, Spencer Williams, Carson Robison, Tom Delaney, J. C. Johnson, and Claude Hopkins. Davis dropped the Triangle imprint in the 1930s and replaced it with Joe Davis, Inc. He sold the firm in 1939 and went into the record manufacturing business. In May 1942, Davis founded his first record label, Beacon Records. On Beacon, Davis published in 1943 and 1944 the music of Billy Murray/Monroe Silver (Casey and Cohen in the Army, 1943), Irving Kaufman with the Buddy Clark Orchestra, and local vocal ensembles as The Red Caps. In 1944, Davis purchased most of the short-lived Varsity label's hundreds of master records when they went bankrupt in the early 1940s, but had with Varsity a tiny shellac ration from which to press the records. Joe Davis then pressed token quantities of records by the State Street Ramblers (Jimmy Blythe), Thomas A. Dorsey (as Georgia Tom), and Bradley Kincaid, using Gennett and Champion masters, also reissues from the 1939-Varsity label by Harry James, Frank Trumbauer, Vincent Lopez, Sammy Kaye, or The Three Suns;. but had a tiny shellac ration from which to press the records.