Katherine Davis

Listening to them on the radio as a youngster, Katherine Davis was enamored with the lifestyle of the early great blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. She was determined to make singing her career since the clothes, cars and other accoutrements of the high life of her role models fascinated her. Like many singers of African-American ethnicity, and with family roots in the South before emigrating to Chicago, Katherine Davis' first "public" performances came when she was a youngster singing gospel in a church choir. In the early 1980s, Davis moved on to study classical...