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Biography
Jackie Davis was the first musician to popularize jazz on the Hammond organ, years before Jimmy Smith's name became synonymous with organ jazz. Davis was Capitol's leading performer on the organ at a time when relatively few mainstream labels were willing to put a black musician on the cover of an album.
Davis once said that music came to him genetically. His mother played the washtub, a cheap substitute for the bass, and he first learned to play by spending hours poking at his grandmother's piano. By the age of eight, he was playing with a local dance band. The rest of the band had ten years or more on him, and he later remarked that he had "eighteen godfathers who kept their pedal extremities in sensitive areas of my anatomy." He later described the experience as his best education in music and in life. By the age of eleven, he'd earned enough from playing to buy his own piano, and music enabled him to pay his way through Florida A&M College, where he graduated with a bachelors degree in music in 1943.
