Mac Davis: Songwriter from the Hub City

Before Mac Davis wrote songs for Elvis Presley, he was a kid from Lubbock learning to navigate a music industry that had no obvious place for a West Texan. He was born here on January twenty-first, nineteen forty-two, and left for Atlanta as a young man, where he eventually found work as a regional manager for Liberty Records and Vee Jay Records.

His songwriting career accelerated when he went to work for Nancy Sinatra's company, Boots Enterprises. But his most consequential professional relationship was with Elvis Presley. Davis wrote In the Ghetto, recorded by Presley in nineteen sixty-nine, which reached number three on the Billboard chart, one of the first openly political songs of Presley's career, about poverty and cyclical violence in Chicago. He also wrote A Little Less Conversation, Don't Cry Daddy, and Memories.

Davis went on to a solo career in the nineteen seventies, scoring a number-one hit with Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me in nineteen seventy-two. He hosted his own NBC variety show and appeared in films. He died on September twenty-ninth, twenty twenty, at the age of seventy-eight.

His name is part of Lubbock's geography: Mac Davis Lane runs through the city, and the West Texas Walk of Fame in the Depot District honors him alongside Buddy Holly and other musicians who came from this flat, unlikely cradle of American popular music. Lubbock has produced a remarkable density of influential artists for a city its size, a fact that still prompts curiosity among music historians who cannot fully explain it.