For a very long time, it was very hard to learn anything about the woman behind the cover of Betty Davis. It's widely known she was once married to Miles Davis (hence her surname) but that's hardly enough to explain how a former First Lady of Jazz became the leading Femme Fatale of Funk. Moreover, if you scanned the credits on her albums, you realized that Betty wasn't merely a mouthpiece for a male producer or songwriter but an artist in her own right, an independent visionary in an era where Black female solo artists were a rarity. In a show of independence that has few comparisons, then or now, Betty wrote every song she ever recorded and produced every album after her first. That puts her in rarefied company among all musical artists, male or female. Yet, despite an earned reputatio...