Back-seat Betty.(Betty Davis)

If you were to draw a diagram of funk music in the early seventies, Betty Davis would be dead center. Born Betty Mabry, she was married to Miles Davis long enough to turn him on to funk-rock, was acquainted with both Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, and was just as freaky as George Clinton. In 1973, after years as a scenester and model, she cut a self-titled debut album with members of the Family Stone. A second album followed a year later. "Betty Davis" and "They Say I'm Different," newly rereleased by the Seattle-based independent label Light in the Attic, document their time and serve as a measure of how far music has come since then. Not very far, as it turns out.

Other funk stars wrote political anthems, charted a more personal course, or--in the case of great artists like Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield--did both. Davis's purview was narrower. For the most part, she dealt frontally with sex; she was, as the title of a later album would have it, a Nasty Gal. Though "Betty Davis" is heavier on guitars and "They Say I'm Different" heavier on keyboards, the two are very much of a piece. Davis's rough and dirty vocals are perfectly suited to the rough and dirty funk, not to mention subjects like casual sex ("If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up"), S & M ...