Meet John William Davis

Today we’d like to introduce you to John William Davis.

Thanks for sharing your story with us John William. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I have been playing music on and off for over fifty years. I have also done many other things out of necessity. I am primarily known as a songwriter in folk circles. In non-COVID times, I do concerts.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Music is almost never a smooth road. There are the personal obstacles . . . mainly just trying when it seems there’s no reason because the business side of music has pretty much destroyed so much for independent musicians.

Please tell us about your music.
I write and perform songs, and have the respect of songwriters I in turn respect. I suppose that’s the major reward. I started off as the lead guitarist for many bands years ago. I played rock, jazz, blues, soul, country. And I was focused exclusively on the music. This experience enabled me to compose music outside the basic three-chord structure of much rock and country and also gave me some idea of arranging and producing. But during the ten years I did not play, I was off studying poetry and prose, eventually teaching the same. As a result, I became comfortable creating lyrics. That’s how the requisite parts of songwriting came together for me. I have won a number of major songwriting competitions in the past, though I eventually quit competing after judging a few competitions (the whole idea of competition in music began to sour).

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
In the woods that surrounded the home, I grew up in lived a huge wateroak, canted from ancient hurricane. So that a small boy could practically walk to the upper fork and from there to even higher branches. This tree was my sanctuary. And a young boy from my home needed a sanctuary because, back in the late fifties and early sixties, South Georgia was a haven for pretty hard men. They’d known hard work and hard times from Reconstruction on. Their fathers and grandfathers had known defeat. They were bitter and the young, especially young men, were often the targets for their frustrations. My stepfather was a bit like that. A very moral man, but a man who wore his anger like sidearm.

Out in my tree, however, I could rise above all those problems, visited by blue dragonflies and monarch butterflies circling the fox grape vines, squirrels and raccoons performing balletic routines in the branches, the smell of rot and new life suffusing everything. The occasional gator or rattlesnake would slip through the thick undergrowth while storks and cowbirds roosted in nearby cypress and sweet gum trees. Beauty, danger, the cycle of life: it wove a spell deep in my bones. I often found myself lying back in the fork of the oak, watching for the shapes of giants or ships in the huge cumili drifting in from the Atlantic. My favorite childhood memories are always of dreaming places.