[1] Davis was a nationally popular country music and gospel singer from the 1930s into the 1960s, occasionally recording and performing as late as the early 1990s.

The college president, Monroe E. Dodd, who was also the pastor of First Baptist Church of Shreveport and a radio preacher, invited Davis to serve on the faculty.

In one case, anti-Davis forces played some records over an outdoor sound system, only to give up after the crowds started dancing, ignoring the double-entendre lyrics.

[citation needed] In 1999, "You Are My Sunshine" was honored with a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, and the Recording Industry Association of America named it one of the Songs of the Century.

He was a close friend of the North Dakota-born band leader Lawrence Welk, who frequently reminded viewers of his television program of his association with Davis.

[citation needed] Davis was also a close acquaintance of the country singer-songwriter Hank Williams, with whom he co-wrote the top-10 hit[10] "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle" in 1951, supposedly on a fishing day they spent together.

In the runoff, Davis defeated Lewis L. Morgan, an elderly attorney and former U.S. representative from Covington, the seat of St. Tammany Parish, who had been backed by former Governor Earl Kemp Long and New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri.

Davis pleased white liberals with his appointments to high positions of two of the leaders of the impeachment effort against Huey Long.

In addition, Davis retained the anti-Long Ralph Norman Bauer of St. Mary Parish as House speaker, a selection made originally in 1940 by Sam Jones.

He is in many respects a toned-down version of the old-style southern politician who could spellbound the mass of voters into supporting him regardless of the effects of his programs on their welfare.

... Davis creates the perfect image of a man to be trusted and one whose intense calm is calculated to bring rational balance into the political life of the state.

In 1954 the US Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and urged states to integrate their facilities.

With a pledge to fight for continued segregation in public education, Davis won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination over a crowded field.

As African Americans (who had supported the Republican Party after the Civil War) were still largely disenfranchised in Louisiana, the Democratic primary was the only competitive race for office in the one-party state.

It was given unusual [clarification needed] powers to investigate state citizens, and used its authority to exert economic pressure to suppress civil rights activists.

A little over a year after Alvern's death in 1967, Davis married the widowed Anna Gordon (February 15, 1917 – March 5, 2004) in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia on December 4, 1968 (The Tennessean).

Anna was born Effie Juanita Carter and had been a founding member of the gospel quartet The Chuck Wagon Gang along with her father, a sister and a brother.

He is interred alongside his first wife at the Jimmie Davis Tabernacle Cemetery in his native Beech Springs community near Quitman.

[32] The Davis archives of papers and photographs is housed in the "You Are My Sunshine" Collection of the Linus A. Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.