The Life and Legacy of Mac Davis: A Musical Icon (1942–2020)

Mac Davis, songwriter, singer, movie and Broadway actor, and television personality, was born Morris Mac Davis in Lubbock, Texas, on January 21, 1942. He was the son of Thomas Jefferson Davis and Edith Irene (Lankford) Davis. Though he later recalled his preoccupation with playing sports and “fisticuffs” as a youth, music played an important role in Davis’s life from his early childhood. He started out singing in the church choir, and his father bought him a guitar when he was nine. Davis’s parents divorced when he was young, and he and his sister lived with their father in Lubbock, while a brother lived with their mother in Atlanta, Georgia. The new rock-and-roll craze in the mid-1950s inspired Davis’s musical aspirations. As he recounted in an interview with author Christopher J. Oglesby, “When I was a kid in Lubbock, I saw Buddy Holly driving down the street with a bunch of girls in his convertible.  That was the exact moment I decided I wanted to be a singer.”  Another pivotal moment for thirteen-year-old Mac took place on June 3, 1955, when he watched Elvis Presley “shake the showroom of the local Pontiac dealership.” 

Davis attended Lubbock High School and graduated at age sixteen in 1958. After graduation he relocated to the Atlanta, Georgia, area to live with his mother. There he started a rock group called the Zots and became involved in the live music scene before taking a job as regional manager with Vee Jay Records. In 1965 he assumed the same duties at Liberty Records and eventually transferred to Los Angeles. Davis sold his first song, “The Phantom,” to the manager of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. After Liberty Records, he joined Boots Enterprises, owned by Nancy Sinatra, and stayed with this company until 1970. During this time Elvis Presley had Top 40 hits with several Davis songs, including “In the Ghetto” (which reached Number 3 in 1969), “Don’t Cry Daddy,” and “Memories.” Presley recorded a total of seven of Davis’s compositions. A remix of Elvis’s performance of “A Little Less Conversation” became a global smash in 2002. In addition to recordings by Presley, Mac Davis’s songs have been recorded by Nancy Sinatra, Lou Rawls, Glen Campbell, Bobby Goldsboro, Dolly Parton, Ray Price, B. J. Thomas, Perry Como, and others. Davis’s song “Something’s Burning” became a Top 20 hit for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition in 1970.

After signing with Columbia Records in 1970 and then with Casablanca Records in 1979, Davis, as both a singer and a recording artist, enjoyed a series of pop-country crossover hits for the next decade. “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me” reached Number 1 in 1972, and “Stop and Smell the Roses” reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1974. His tune, “I Believe in Music,” which scored a Top 40 hit for the pop group Gallery in 1972, became Davis’s signature song at his concerts for years. The Academy of Country Music named him Entertainer of the Year in 1974. In 1975 he was honored with Favorite Male Performer at the first People’s Choice Awards. His songs “It’s Hard to Be Humble” (1980), “Texas in My Rear View Mirror” (1980), and “Hooked on Music” (1981) had similar success on Billboard’s country chart. In total, he had four Top 40 pop hits and sixteen Top 40 songs on the country charts. During his later years he collaborated with Swedish deejay Avicii and Bruno Mars.

Davis once confessed that he considered himself a songwriter at heart and commented,  “Everything else has been gravy.” Although he left Lubbock after high school, he never forgot his West Texas roots throughout his lengthy career. Of all the songs he had written, his favorite was “Texas in My Rear View Mirror.”  He declared, “It’s what I am and who I am, and besides it has a good rhyme scheme and melody”  One particular line—“I thought happiness was Lubbock Texas in my rear view mirror”—has often been misinterpreted as a put-down of the city. This is an oversight easily corrected by simply listening all the way to the end when the lyrics conclude: “But now happiness is Lubbock, Texas, growing nearer and dearer.…And when I die you can bury me in Lubbock, Texas, in my jeans.”  

Davis was a ubiquitous presence on television, especially during the 1970s. He had his own musical variety series, The Mac Davis Show, on NBC from 1974 to 1976 and regularly shared stories about growing up in the Lone Star State. He also hosted several television specials. In addition, he was both a guest on The Tonight Show and filled in for its host Johnny Carson, and he made appearances on The Muppet Show. His film career began auspiciously when he earned high praise for his role as a Don Meredith-style quarterback in North Dallas Forty (1979), a movie some critics have characterized as the best football film ever made and one of the best sports-related movies. Davis gained twenty pounds in one month to bulk up for the role. He then starred in the poorly-received comedy Cheaper to Keep Her (1981) and joined Jackie Gleason in The Sting II (1983). Davis also had a stint on Broadway. In 1993 he replaced Keith Carradine as Will Rogers in The Will Rogers Follies. 

Lubbock expressed its appreciation for the homeboy’s accomplishments in 1983, when Davis joined Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings as the third inductee of the West Texas Walk of Fame. His other awards and accolades include membership in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame (1996), Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (2000), Texas Country Music Hall of Fame (2004), and Songwriters Hall of Fame (2006). He also earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1998).

Through the years, when he was asked about Lubbock, Davis typically replied, “If I was going to have a flat tire without a spare, Lubbock is where I’d like to be.” On July 31, 2004, the city renamed downtown 6th Street Mac Davis Lane in his honor. At that time the only other Lubbock street named for a musician was Buddy Holly Avenue. Mac Davis died of complications from recent heart surgery on September 29, 2020, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was survived by his wife of thirty-eight years, Lise Gerard Davis, their two sons, and one son from a previous marriage. Fittingly, upon his death and after all those years in Los Angeles and Nashville, Davis returned home and was buried in City of Lubbock Cemetery and, most appropriately, in a pair of his jeans.