|
Jimmie Davis
His
birthday is still a mystery, as he was never exactly
sure of the year. He once told the New York Times
that his parents could not remember either, but it was
sometime between 1899 and 1903.1 James Houston Davis was
born as one of eleven children to Sam Houston and Sarah
Elizabeth Works Davis in Beech Springs, Louisiana.2 His
father was a sharecropper that farmed cotton, and Davis
grew up in a tar paper shack.3 He did not have a bed to
sleep in until he was nine years old. His younger sister
died because the family could not afford medical
attention, and
Davis helped his father
build her coffin out of wood that they found.4 At the
age of ten he picked cotton and was active on the
farm.5
He went to grade
school at Quitman and graduated from Beech
Springs High School in 1920.
He went to Pineville and enrolled in Louisiana
College. During his summer vacations he worked odd jobs to defray the cost of
going to college. He washed dishes in the college
kitchen and sang on the street corner. He attended
Louisiana
College, where he organized a quartet and was part of the Glee Club. He
received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924, after
taking time off from college to teach in order to pay
for college. He returned to the Beech Springs school
where he worked as a teacher; he later taught at
Weston
Elementary School. He
received his Master of Arts degree in 1927 from
Louisiana State University. At LSU he
organized the “Tiger Four,” a popular quartet.6 The
first time Davis sang “You Are My Sunshine,” written in
1927, was at the Glee Club when he was at Louisiana
State University in Baton
Rouge. He made his first recording, a song called
“Baby’s Lullaby,” in 1928 in Memphis, Tennessee’s Peabody Hotel.7
He served as city clerk from 1930 until 1937.8
He married Alvern Adams,
a school teacher and the daughter of Dr. W. M. Adams and
Etta Adams, in 1936 in the living room of the Eglin
House, which stands at 1743 Irving Place. Arthur D.
Eglin, the maternal grandfather of Governor John J.
McKeithen,9 built the home in about 1899. Dr. W. M.
Adams and his wife, Etta Adams, bought the home from
McKeithen. Davis and Alverne lived there for a while
before his first term in office, which began in 1944.
Alva Cook bought it from the Adams later on. The home is
done in the transitional Queen Anne to Neoclassical
style.10
In 1938 Davis became
the city commissioner of public safety, and in 1942 he
held a seat on the state Public Service Commission. He
recorded “You Are My Sunshine” on February 4, 1940. He
appeared in Riding through Nevada in 1943. In
1945 he was elected governor.11
His term
as governor ended in 1948. In his first administration
he saw that automobiles were licensed, as prior to that
time, anyone could drive. In his second administration
he built hospitals, created and repaired roads, kept
taxes low, set up the first civil services, and raised
teachers’ wages.12 After leaving office in 1948, his
Sunshine Band toured the United States, stopping in
Anniston, Alabama. There, their
opening act was a new musician, Hank Williams, Sr. Davis
lived in Shreveport from 1948 until 1960 in a house
built in 1918 at 843 Delaware Street.13
He won the
election in 1960 and served a second term as governor.
Alvern died in 1967, and in 1968 Davis married Anna
Carter Gordon Davis. (James Davis, Jr. was born to this
union.)14 Davis ran in the gubernatorial race of 1971,
but was unsuccessful.15
Jimmie Davis died at
his Baton Rouge home on November 5, 2000.16
References
Back to Top
|
