Guy Davis

Guy Davis, born May 12, 1952, in New York, New York, is an American actor, blues guitarist, banjo player, and two-time Grammy Award nominee. The only son of actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, he is the second of their children.

Davis traces the inspiration for his blues music to the Southern speech of his grandmother and to stories of rural Southern life he heard from his parents and grandparents while growing up in the New York City area. He taught himself guitar by observing and listening to other musicians rather than taking formal lessons, acquiring fingerpicking technique from a nine-fingered guitarist he encountered on a train between Boston and New York. His introduction to the blues came at a Vermont summer camp operated by John Seeger, brother of Pete Seeger, where Davis first learned to play the five-string banjo.

His acting career began with a lead role opposite Rae Dawn Chong in the 1984 film Beat Street, followed by a television role as Dr. Josh Hall on the soap opera One Life to Live from 1985 to 1986. Davis made his Broadway debut in 1991 in Mule Bone, the stage collaboration between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, which featured music by Taj Mahal. He later returned to Broadway in Finian's Rainbow, with his Broadway career spanning from 1991 to 2009.

Off Broadway, Davis portrayed blues musician Robert Johnson in the 1993 production Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil, a role that earned him the Blues Foundation's Keeping the Blues Alive Award, presented by Robert Cray at the W.C. Handy Awards ceremony that same year. The following year, his self-written one-man show In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters made its Off-Broadway debut in 1994 and drew praise from the New York Times and the Village Voice. In 2022, Davis wrote and performed Sugarbelly and Other Tales My Father Told Me, a one-man show presented by Crossroads Theater at the Arthur Laurents Theater in the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

His writing for the stage extends to additional projects. Mudsurfing, a collection of three short stories, received the 1991 Brio Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. The Trial, an anti-drug one-act play later retitled The Trial: Judgement of the People, toured New York City shelters and was produced Off-Broadway in 1990 at the McGinn Cazale Theater. Davis also arranged, performed, and co-wrote music for an Emmy Award-winning film, To Be a Man, and his music was featured in the 1995 national PBS series The American Promise.

As a recording artist on Red House Records, Davis released his debut album Stomp Down Rider in late 1995, a live record that appeared on year-end lists in the Boston Globe and Pulse magazine. Subsequent albums included Call Down the Thunder, which Acoustic Guitar named one of thirty essential CDs from a new generation of performers, and You Don't Know My Mind, which features backing vocals by Olu Dara and was named Blues Album of the Year by the Association for Independent Music. His fourth album, Butt Naked Free, was produced by John Platania, a former guitarist for Van Morrison, and featured contributions from Levon Helm, Tommy Wolk, Carly Simon, and Gary Burke, among others; the musicians performed the track Waitin' On the Cards to Fall on the Conan O'Brien show. His 2004 album Legacy was selected as one of the best CDs of the year by National Public Radio, and its lead track, Uncle Tom's Dead, was chosen as one of NPR's best songs of the year. Chocolate to the Bone earned a Blues Music Award nomination for Best Acoustic Blues Album, and Davis has received ten Blues Music Award nominations overall, including recognition as Best Acoustic Blues Artist on two occasions.

Ian Anderson, founder and lead singer of Jethro Tull, invited Davis to open for the band during the summer of 2003. Davis has contributed to tribute and compilation albums honoring artists including Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Nick Lowe, and Bob Dylan, and appeared alongside Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen on Where Have All the Flowers Gone, a collection of songs written by Pete Seeger. He also contributed to I Will Be Your Friend: Songs and Activities for Young Peacemakers, produced by Larry Long and distributed by the Southern Poverty Law Center to public schools nationwide. Additional projects include writing and recording with Dr. John for Whoopi Goldberg's Littleburg series and appearing on Jack's Big Music Show, both for the Nickelodeon network, as well as residency programs for the Lincoln Center Institute.