The Two Martha Davises

I first got turned onto The Motels when I was a kid. It was their song “Only the Lonely” — with accompanying music video, a treasure from the Golden Age of MTV, when music videos were treated unironically like cinema.

I also got sucked in by the music video for “Suddenly, Last Summer”, plus a song I heard only once — one morning, waking up to my clock-radio —  and have never heard since: “Mission of Mercy”. Isn’t that funny how you can hear a song in a state of half-consciousness for a few minutes, and it’ll be stuck in your brain for the rest of your whole life? All I can say is, thank God it was The Motels and not Beyoncé.

The singer of The Motels, Martha Davis, fascinated me. I remember reading somewhere that she’d gotten pregnant at 14, married at 15, and now (I’m talking around 1982), at 28 years of age, had a hit single with The Motels, “Only the Lonely”. I loved her sad, distinctive voice, and her cinematic, femme-fatale look in the “Only the Lonely” music video. She was an out-of-time torch singer in the new wave eighties.

So I looked her up today on the web to see what’s going on with her nowadays. But then I ran into another Martha Davis: an African-American piano player, born in 1914, died in 1960, who used to perform with her husband under the name “Martha Davis and Spouse”.

I thought that was pretty funny. Back in those days, it was customary for the woman to erase her identity, renaming herself “Mrs.” and then following it up with her husband’s first and last names. For example, Courtney Love would be called “Mrs. Kurt Cobain”.

But in this case, it was the husband who had no name. Not even her name! Just a generic categorization: “Spouse”. Like “Cat” or “Dog” or “Table”. To look at their performances, it’s not hard to imagine that she might have wore the pants around the house. She was a big lady.

A singer as well, Martha Davis’s piano style was influenced by Fats Waller. She formed a musical comedy duo with her husband, a bass player named Calvin Ponder. Sadly, she died young, at the age of 42.

Enjoy the video. I don’t know when or where it was shot, but it’s obviously a clip from one of the few movies they appeared in.  She looks like she could be chopping onions or drying dishes, she’s so relaxed at that piano… and making wisecracks at the same time! What ease and confidence! As a former piano player (and a pretty crummy one), I admire her abilities.