Jackie Davis

Emerging among the first wave of jazz organists, Jackie Davis appeared shortly after Wild Bill Davis and roughly alongside Milt Buckner and Bill Doggett. Born in Jacksonville, FL, on December 13, 1920, he took up piano locally well before turning ten. He soon entered a band and a 19-piece orchestra, later pursuing formal studies at Florida A&M. Although he tried the pipe organ, Davis waited for the Hammond’s arrival, whose faster response to touch rendered it far better suited to jazz. In his early years he followed Wild Bill Davis, and, like Bill Doggett, spent a little over a year in Louis Jordan’s band, acquiring crucial experience. From the mid-’50s onward he led his own dates, logging sixteen years and numerous albums with Capitol that began with Hi-Fi Hammond. The bulk of this output belonged to small-group soul-jazz, frequently featuring pop standards, yet it also included shifts in instrumentation on Jackie Davis Meets the Trombones and The Hammond Organ Plus Voices as well as stylistic excursions such as Hammond Gone Cha-Cha and later gospel recordings. In 1980 he resurfaced with a self-titled EMI album and a role in the comedy Caddyshack. He remained a Jacksonville resident until his death there on November 2, 1999, from complications following a stroke.