Francis Davis, celebrated music critic, author, and historian, has died at 78
He wrote seven books and was a contributing editor and writer for years at The Inquirer, Atlantic, Village Voice, and Musician magazine.
Francis Davis, 78, of Philadelphia, award-winning music critic, prolific author, popular culture essayist, Grammy-winning album notes writer, music historian, and college instructor, died Monday, April 14, of Parkinson’s disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at his home.
Inspired as a boy in the 1950s, he said, by the phrasing and rhythm of Bobby Darin’s music, and the words and themes of Norman Mailer’s writing, Mr. Davis created his own 50-year career that featured seven books, thousands of essays and critical reviews, lectures, interviews, and teaching presentations. He was a contributing editor and writer for years at The Inquirer, the Atlantic, the Village Voice, and Musician and Seven Days magazines, and his work appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and a dozen other publications.
In 2001, he told Joe Maita, publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician: “Writing about music is trying to figure out why it reaches you and communicate that to someone else, hopefully.”
He wrote hundreds of music reviews and features for The Inquirer in the 1980s and ’90s, and praised “the spunk of the saxophone solos, the push of the rhythm section, and the wallop of [Benny] Wallace’s cheeky variations on the chord changes” in a 1987 album review. And he wrote about people.
“If I go to a concert and I’m supposed to be reviewing it, and I’m taking notes, I sometimes wind up jotting down as much about the audience as I do about the performers,” he told the Atlantic in 1996. “I’m interested in what music means to people. What does it signify to them?”
He wrote about Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, Wynton Marsalis and Billie Holiday. His work is in anthologies and textbooks. In 2013, fellow writer Peter Pullman called him “the best prose stylist writing on jazz.” Pullman said: “He may be the best prose stylist who writes on the arts.”
“When talking to most older musicians in or originally from Philadelphia, inevitably you end up talking about [John] Coltrane.”
His books include 2004’s Jazz and Its Discontents, 2002’s Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, 1996’s Bebop and Nothingness, and 1995’s The History of the Blues. He interviewed bandleader Sun Ra, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, and scores of other creative notables.
He taught classes on jazz and the blues at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, and headlined seminars, panels, and conferences on the arts and culture. He joined the Atlantic in 1984, and colleagues there said in an online profile that his “interest in the social and intellectual significance of jazz, musical theater, pop, and blues has brought a unique depth to his career.”
Generally quiet but lively, Mr. Davis liked to insert first-person asides into his stories, and he told Jerry Jazz Musician: “It used to drive my editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer crazy because you are not supposed to.”
He started a national jazz critics poll in 2006 at the Village Voice, and it moved later to NPR Music. The 2025 results are posted on artfuse.org. He earned fellowships from foundations and universities, awards from the Jazz Journalists Association and American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and a 2008 Grammy for his liner notes on a Miles Davis album.
“This album is nearly unlistenable in places but fascinating in light of the similarities and differences it reveals between the jazz and classical avant gardes, thus the high rating.”
In 2001, editors at Jerry Jazz Musician called Mr. Davis “one of this nation’s savviest and most admired music and cultural critics.” His wife, Terry Gross, said: “He was most comfortable in the world of music, books, and film.”
Francis John Davis was born Aug. 30, 1946. He was reared by his mother and grandmother in Southwest Philadelphia, and he gravitated to music, books, and basketball.
He graduated from John Bartram High School, sang in the school choir, and worked at the local free library. He told Jerry Jazz Musician: "I wanted to be Bobby Darin.“
He studied poetry, drama, psychoanalysis, and literature at Pennsylvania State University and Temple, and worked at local record stores in Philadelphia. He met Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air, at a record store one day, and they met again and again at a nearby bookstore.
“Davis stamped each of his books with judicious editorial rigor, along with ample literary flair.”
“Book stores and record stores are really my museums,” Mr. Davis told Jerry Jazz Musician.
Gross recruited him to write and host a weekly radio jazz feature for Fresh Air, and they worked and spent time together for years before marrying in 1996.
“It was special to know Francis, a guy with great intellect and humor,” Danny Miller, executive producer of Fresh Air, said in a tribute.
Mr. Davis especially enjoyed film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, and his library of books and CDs nearly filled up their home. He and his wife went to movies, musicals, and concerts often, and usually spent hours afterward discussing what they had seen and heard.
He wasn’t much for other social outings, she said, but they enjoyed house-sitting for friends in Manhattan over Christmas and chatting wherever they were about music and culture. For him, she said, music was in life’s foreground.
“He liked to sit and listen,” she said. “We shared a lot.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Davis is survived by other relatives.
A memorial service is to be held later.
Donations in his name may be made to PAWS Philadelphia, Donor Services, 100 N. Second St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19106.