Susie Davis might seem like a mild-mannered children’s music teacher with a gift of kindling her students’ creativity, but in a previous life you might have seen her on stage with the likes of Mick Jagger or Billy Idol.
The longtime Point Richmond resident spent much of her 20s and 30s on the road as a keyboardist and vocalist performing with heavyweight headliners including Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor and Pat Benatar. Her rapid rise to first-call sidewoman came courtesy of Sheila E, who catapulted Davis into the limelight in 1984.
“I was playing in these Top 40 bands when I auditioned for Sheila,” Davis told Richmondside. “We were the opening act on Prince’s Purple Rain tour, so I went from white collar clubs in the Financial District to six sold-out shows in the Cow Palace. It was an amazing first gig!”
E’s group ended up jamming with the artist formerly known as Prince at the end of every show on the tour, a rolling celebration when his Purple Eminence was at the zenith of fame. It was heady stuff, but E’s camp was grounded in family, an illustrious musical clan that includes her father, East Bay Latin jazz great Pete Escovedo, and her brothers, “an amazing family,” Davis says.
These days Davis, 67, and her husband divide their time between Point Richmond and a rural house on the Big Island of Hawaii. When she’s in town she can often be found playing with Those Darn Accordions (TDA), the zany rock combo that played the Point Richmond Music series last month. The group plays Brewsters Beer Garden in Petaluma as part of the Oktoberfest celebrations Oct. 3-4.
Led by squeezebox expert and lead singer Paul Rogers, TDA focuses on original rock and funk material, while also reimagining idioms like ska, country and of course polkas, the accordion’s natural habitat. While Davis was a latecomer to the instrument, she paid musical dues across the spectrum during some two decades on the road.
She moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and thrived as a player for hire, but as the decade wore on she saw the prospects for pursuing her own projects dim. Looking for a return to normalcy after three years of touring with Benatar, she decided to move back to the Bay Area in 1997.
“Being on the road is a great thing for a person in their 20s,” Davis says. “You get very close to a particular group. That’s your family for six or seven months. But I was honing original music and seeing a lot of discrimination. I was in my late 30s and already considered over the hill. It didn’t make me feel good, and I had my midlife crisis early.”
From performing with icons to teaching music to Richmond kids
Meet Your Neighbor
Who: Musician Susie Davis, a retired local music teacher who played with numerous rock icons and now tours with an group of accordionists.
Neighborhood: Point Richmond (part-time)
Richmond resident for: About 25 years
She said: “We have the best climate in the entire Bay Area. Every day we’re in the sun with the cool breezes blowing off the fog. I’ve loved being part of the community.”
Richmond is home to 40+ distinct neighborhoods, a fact that some residents have told us makes them feel disconnected to the city as a whole. This story is part of an occasional series to help Richmonders get to know their neighbors. Do you know someone we should feature? Email hello@richmondside.org or post a tip here.
Though largely self-taught as a musician she was recruited by the San Francisco Blue Bear School of Music to run their summer songwriting program at Fort Mason in San Francisco and found she had a knack for imparting useful information to aspiring musicians, particularly children. Settling in Point Richmond at the turn of the century, Davis used her home studio to create a bustling private practice introducing aspiring musicians to piano, voice, guitar and songwriting, “teaching people what they need to know so they can have as much fun as possible,” she says.
Pianist Hannah Mayer was 5 when she started studying with Davis and quickly wrote her first song “Baby Beluga.” At the time her family lived a few blocks away from Davis, and Mayer studied with her throughout her childhood, eventually successfully auditioning for the Oakland School for the Arts. Davis remembers her early promise.
“I had shown her how to play chords and she had learned a few songs and then showed up for her lesson with this song fully written, ‘Stop Bothering Me.’ Age 7. What a strong creative spirit! I had to capture it.”
Listen to “Stop Bothering Me” by a young Hannah Mayer
Mayer graduated from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University in 2024 and these days she’s a professional jazz pianist and composer in the second year of the prestigious BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Songwriting Workshop in New York City.
While many of her musical peers recall suffering through childhood piano lessons, “it was so the opposite with Susie,” said Mayer, who returns to the Bay Area for winter break and has already lined up gigs: Dec. 30 at the San Francisco supper club Mr. Tipple’s; Jan. 5 at the Deluxe in the Haight; and Jan. 7 at Oakland’s Sound Room.
“It was very playful and fun, mostly learning songs I liked or that she thought I would like,” Mayer told Richmondside. “I was also learning chords and singing. Sometimes we’d record the songs, which was super special. I did get a lot of good theory and technique too, and some classical. It was kind of perfect for what I wanted as a kid.”
Her parents were impressed by the photo of Davis with Mick Jagger hanging on the wall of the basement studio, but Davis kept part of her musical life on the down low. She decided to wind down her teaching practice this summer, which means she can let her musical freak flag fly with her Tight Pajamas project.
“I’ve kept it sort of under wraps as the subject matter is pretty mature,” she says. “But now that I’m not teaching kids anymore I can come out of the box.”
Writing and recording with Jeff Greenwald and sundry family and friends, Davis wryly chronicles various Bay Area subcultures on ditties such as “Ain’t No Swingin’ at the Nudist Resort.” She’s particularly pleased with “Second Favorite Man,” which might be country music’s first pro-polyamory song. Though safe for work, it was included in the Hump! festival.
“How I got a completely PG-13 video into a porn film festival I will never understand,” she says.
That’s not to say she’s got a one-track mind. She recruited several of her students for a disquieting video accompanying her cheerful holiday ode to the bane of naughty children, “Krampus, Oh Krampus.” The video for “The Squirrel at the End of the Bar,” a torch song set amidst the furry subculture, was shot at Point Richmond’s Hotel Mac.
She might spend half her time in Hawaii, but Davis is a die-hard Point Richmond booster, proclaiming the neighborhood, “an amazing place to live. We have the best climate in the entire Bay Area. Every day we’re in the sun with the cool breezes blowing off the fog. I’ve loved being part of the community. So many families know me and sent me their kids to teach, often multiple siblings.”
And now that she’s retired from teaching, Davis is putting the squeeze back into the squeezebox.
