Game was her middle name: The world was never ready for Betty Davis

One of my favorite recordings of Betty Davis isn't a song. In the summer of 1974, the funk singer/songwriter appeared on Al Gee's Rap N' Rhythm, a nationally syndicated interview program that was regularly pressed to vinyl and sent to radio stations by the U.S. Army Reserve. Betty had just turned 30 and was about to start her first tour to help promote her second studio album, They Say I'm Different. Their conversation barely lasted 20 minutes, so Gee could only ask a short series of boilerplate questions about her creative process and astrological sign. Nonetheless, there's this delightful moment where Betty is asked to describe her musical style and she responds in a distinctive Pittsburgh-by-way-of-Greensboro drawl: "I would just say it's raw ... r-a-w."

For many musicians, this kind of casually playful back-and-forth might not be revelatory, but that changes if you consider that the session is, as far as I know, the only extant recorded interview of Betty in the '70s. As such, it's one of the only times where we get a glimpse of her outside her musical persona, and the contrast is startling. Betty the funk artist was irrepressibly rowdy and raucous, a larger-than-life personality who could command a stage with little more than a pose. However, on Gee's program, Betty could be