By blending his diverse background and self-taught style, Guy Davis is adding his own name to the long history of blues music.

“My creativity is pervasive,” declares Guy Davis, his words coming in a pronounced, rhythmic cadence. “I draw from everything. I don’t want to have to make the choice: do you want to act, or do you want to do music?”
Chances are that Davis’s creative urge has a genetic component, as he’s the son of the legendary actors, writers and activists Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Despite being raised in a creative and music-loving household, his introduction to the blues came from a surprising place: “the first music I heard that was the blues was being sung by white college boys. I thought they invented it.”
Though only eight years old at the time, he had found his muse and his passion. “I don’t know if it had anything to do with me ancestor-wise or race-wise, but it was special. I knew it had something in it.”
After his first run-in with the blues, he started teaching himself how to play the guitar and later, the banjo. He also began to learn about the genre’s true heroes—including blues masters like Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell and Howlin’ Wolf—who have also influenced an entire generation of blues musicians.
He released his first solo album in 1978, titled Dreams About Life, on Folkways Records. But his attention soon shifted to acting, as he landed a number of high-profile roles, including the lead in the 1984 film Beat Street and a reoccurring role on the popular soap opera, “One Life to Live.”
In the early 1990s, Davis was cast in a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals that allowed him to combine his passion for the blues with his skills as an actor. He starred in the Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes collaboration, Mulebone, and played blues legend Robert Johnson in Trick the Devil.
Not content to rely on the written words of others, Davis wrote and starred in a one-man musical in 1994, In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, and collaborated with his parents for Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy.
But he never meant to follow the career paths of his renowned parents. “Both my parents were writers,” he explains. “Actors, theater people, word people. I wanted to find something that set me apart from them, so music was something that I had a spark toward...But it has lead me right back around to the theater, because when I do my shows, I am busy telling stories. I am busy using words. Just like my folks did.”
Davis has spent the last 15 years focusing on his music. He has released a dozen albums as a solo artist, the latest of which is the inspired Sweetheart Like You, which came out earlier this year. Blending original material and blues standards, like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Can’t Be Satisfied,” the album is very much in line with the traditional sound of acoustic country blues. But as has been the case throughout his career, Davis puts his own spin on tradition.
“I’m not so concerned with finding the new voice of the blues,” he says with a respectful nonchalance. “Whatever is in me is going to come out. If it’s the new voice, fine. If it’s not, that’s fine, too.”
“The blues as we knew it is getting a little scarcer,” he continues. “[But] I am confident that the blues is going to stay alive. And I will continue to do my part. At the same time, that’s not going to stop me from progressing in any way.”