Death Don't Have No Mercy
The recording was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein, who had pursued Davis in Prestige's effort to capitalize on the revival.
One of Davis' most well-known songs, "Death Don't Have No Mercy" was covered by Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Hot Tuna in the 1960s, reaching the era's young white rock audience.
The song was one of the last Davis performed before his death, playing a fierce rendition of it at a Northport, Long Island church concert in April 1972, organized in part by the future photographer Doug Menuez.
[1][nb 1] Evelina soon gave guardianship of him over to her own mother and, though still present in his life, refused any emotional connection with him, another event that profoundly impacted Davis and the themes he would explore in his musical career.
[3][nb 2] Despite this, she purchased an inexpensive guitar for Davis after he turned seven and had demonstrated a curiosity and talent for music, being exposed to instruments through family connections and to local sounds from plantation field work songs, informal rural gatherings, traveling tent shows, and spirituals sung in the black Baptist church, which served as a communal safe haven from the rising threat of racial violence.
[7] There, he lived with his wife Annie in a modest East Bronx apartment, surviving on welfare checks, offerings from churches where he preached, and gratuities from his street performances in neighborhoods like Harlem.
His weekly performances at the Lower East Side apartment of Tiny Ledbetter (Lead Belly's niece), a gathering place for revivalists, also greatly influenced many young guitarists and enhanced his stature as a musician.
[13][nb 4] By 1960, Goldstein had become the top producer of folk music in the U.S. and was working with Rudy Van Gelder, who himself had earned renown as a meticulous sound engineer for major jazz musicians and labels.
The previous year, Gelder had his own studio built on a wooded lot in the suburb of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, featuring innovative recording equipment and a high-ceiling space designed for delicate acoustics.
[14] On August 24, 1960, Davis was driven from his apartment to the studio for a recording session that would produce songs for his prospective LP album Harlem Street Singer, among them "Death Don't Have No Mercy".
[15] Under Goldstein's supervision, and with Van Gelder engineering the studio session, Davis played a weather-worn Gibson J-200 guitar and recorded 20 songs in the span of three hours, the last of which was "Death Don't Have No Mercy".
[20] Commenting on his guitar playing, Zack says Davis demonstrates improvisation and a strong sense of chords while utilizing "the entire fretboard" in a way that deviates from the more conventional twelve-bar, three-chord blues of Robert Johnson and other recording acts in the genre.
A chord sequence descending by fifths from the B7 through E-minor, A, D, and G, then returning to B7, develops the foreboding tone established by the minor tonic and dissonant dominant, portraying strength and balance slipping quickly away.
This tension is then downplayed by a straight i–iv (E-minor to A-minor) chord change as the lyrics announce the physical discovery of a dead family member with a sense of resignation, and the first line repeats to conclude the verse.
While not politically outspoken, Davis had frequently performed concerts benefiting causes of the Civil Rights Movement and played a "sing-in for peace" at Carnegie Hall a month earlier in response to the war.
However, with anti-war sentiment beginning to intensify around the country, the rally proved an atypically turbulent event for the bluesman, whose performance accompanied speeches by the pacifist clergyman A. J. Muste and the journalist I. F. Stone while more than ten thousand protesters and counterprotesters clashed violently in nearby streets.
[36] Ironically, a song that was so personal to Davis would take on a whole new meaning for young white rock fans by the time the Grateful Dead and Hot Tuna covered it late in the decade during the worst Vietnam turmoil.
"At the hoots of Cafe Yana and the Unicorn, people were playing 'Twelve Gates to the City' and 'Death Don't Have No Mercy,'" recalled David Wilson, who founded the Boston-based folk magazine Broadside in 1962.
[39] Jerry Garcia, a vocalist-guitarist for the Grateful Dead, first heard "Death Don't Have No Mercy" on Harlem Street Singer and incorporated it into the band's live repertoire in the late 1960s, transforming the song into a slow-moving, impassioned performance.
Nicholas G. Meriwether, a Grateful Dead archivist for UC Santa Cruz, later reviewed a bootleg recording of the show and found their rendition to be either "terrifying" or "a magnificent catharsis" while observing "spooky, gentle" and "eerie" qualities in Ron "Pigpen" McKernan's organ work.
[22] Kaukonen's rendition of "Death Don't Have No Mercy", which resembled the original, featured on the band's self-titled album, recorded in late 1969 at the New Orleans House in Berkeley and released the following year.
[46] In March of that year, while recuperating at a hospital from a heart attack, Davis received a letter from the teenage blues fans Doug Menuez and Seth Fahey, inviting him to play a concert in their Long Island village of Northport.
