I’ve been out of Indiana for six and a half years now, so it’s not surprising that I would be detached from a lot of Indianapolis-area news in that period unless I were subscribing to an Indiana news outlet.
I elected not to continue my IndyStar online subscription after moving, and for the most part, I hadn’t felt like I missed a lot.
But in the days since composing my previous post, the one commemorating blues musician Gene Deer, I’ve learned that another Indy community blues stalwart, 73-year-old Governor Davis, had died in October 2021 of Covid-related complications. And given how huge of a blues stalwart that Davis was and how much I enjoyed his shows, I figured I owed him a post here, too.
I’d seen Davis and his longtime band, the Blues Ambassadors, perform many times at the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis. Davis was a delightful showman known for wearing colorful threads and a wide-brimmed fedora and for taking his cordless guitar and making forays into the audience to play up close and personal. It wasn’t hard for him to get customers to dance at their tables, in the aisles and — during the late set at the Slippery Noodle when attendance had thinned to half a dozen to a dozen — on the bench seats of the front stage. It was crazy good fun, in fact.
Governor Davis and the Blues Ambassadors had two tracks on the 1994 Slippery Noodle Sound live-performance compilation CD, and both are fantastic. A wonderful pumping bass riff drives “Faith,” and the danceable Elmore James classic “Shake Your Money Maker” was an enjoyable Governor Davis concert staple.
He and the Blues Ambassadors also had two CDs, both issued by JK Publishing — “I Am the Governor” in 1997 and “Live” in 2001.
The Governor (which was his real name) was born in Chicago and grew up around blues music at Chicago clubs because his father, also named Governor, worked in car repair and his customers included many Chicago blues musicians, so dad got to play piano in the clubs.
At the urging of his father who wanted his son to get “a real job” (i.e., not vehicle repair), Governor moved to Indiana and enrolled in two-year Vincennes University, where he studied social work and played in several music ensembles, according to his obituary. He finished his studies at Ball State University in Muncie, where he taught himself how to play guitar, sat in with local bands and learned the art of performance. He got his degree there in 1977.
After brief employment in social work, he elected to work as a musician full time, and the rest is history. He made Muncie his home, and played there, in Indianapolis, Lafayette and in other locales in the Midwest and beyond. He and the Blues Ambassadors took a break from each other circa 2012 when the Governor sought medical help to figure out why he was experiencing bouts of mental health lows.
After being diagnosed as Type 2 bipolar and taking some time off from the stage, he returned to performing, but not with Blues Ambassadors. The Governor Davis Blues Band was born. Today, there is a Blues Ambassadors band, based in central Indiana, performing with the Governor’s longtime guitarist Steve Robbins. (Longtime bassist Jose Joven, 74, died in November 2023.)
Like the photos I used for my post on Gene Deer, I took the photos in this post on April 20, 2011, at the Slippery Noodle Inn, which was hosting a memorial and benefit blues jam for Jerry Booth, front man for for the Indy blues band Mean Weenies. Booth (aka Jerry Blues) had died on April 15.
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