Byron “BK” Davis has a secret he’s been sharing with audiences around the world for years.
The soulful, friendly and enthusiastic 66-year-old Davenport native is a Steinway International Artist, and has been composing and performing music for well over 40 years. He was raised in a musical household. His father, Bishop Ezekiel Davis, conscripted him as a teen to serve as musical director for the seven churches he oversaw, while his mother, Rose Davis, an accomplished vocalist, attended to his vocal and instrumental training, according to his bio.
The jazz pianist/singer plays more than a dozen instruments, including piano, guitar, organ and drums in idioms spanning Jazz, R&B, gospel, soul, and pop. BK has written theme music and jingles for the Boy Scouts of America and an Indianapolis 500 race, and has directed choirs throughout the Midwest and West Coast. Davis has played or toured with artists including B.B. King, Billy Preston, Gerald Albright, Michael “Patches” Stewart and the late soul legend, Johnnie Taylor.
He co-wrote original music with rock and roll legend Little Richard, as well as McFadden and Whitehead.
His inspiring life story is the subject of a cinematic new autobiography, “Invisible Secret: A Novel of Fire, Faith and Music.”
“BK’s story is one of faith, resilience and creativity,” the 187-page book’s back cover says. “His memoir captures the rhythm of a life shaped by music, family and purpose – an intimate look at the man behind the music and the melodies that continue to move hearts around the world.”
Generously, the appendix to the self-published paperback includes lead sheets (chords, melody and lyrics) to several Davis originals. Davis has a primary home in Burlington, Iowa, but is spending several months currently touring in Central America.
“Invisible Secret” started as a January 2023 album, and concert series, which brought him to Davenport’s Redstone Room on Feb. 5 that year.
The book traces his early roots in the church where his father was a pastor, and the mystical way music came to him at young age. It extends through his education (including playing football at Davenport Central), military service, and the contract to perform in the prestigious Steinway piano program.
Davis called his multi-layered project “Invisible Secret” to reflect the ineffable magic of music – something that’s heard and felt, but not seen.
“The way it works together. Invisible secret, we agreed that it was the most beautiful thing for this series,” he said, in a March 4 phone interview from Belize, Central America. “The secret is that, okay, you can hear music, but you cannot see it. So it's invisible in that sense. And the secret is that unless you can read music, it's really imperceptible because we're dealing with sound.”
The book is a different, creative take on his life story, following his more traditional 2021 memoir, “Ivory Towers: A True Story,” and he recorded both as audio books. “Invisible Secret” is in novel format, written about his life in the third person. Some scenes are fictionalized accounts of real events, and it closes with an emotional outdoor concert in a Scott County cornfield (which did not happen).
“Out in that area, we've got a bunch of cornfields,” Davis said of the area by the Mt. Joy airport. “So I just imagined. I dreamed up doing a final concert for my dad, you know, because we lost my father in 1994. And so I felt like I wanted to just kind of touch back home where it all began in Iowa, right there in the Quad Cities, and I wanted to touch on somehow, how my dad must have felt or that kind of stuff. So I just use my imagination. It's a very emotional ending.”
He wanted to reconnect with his long-lost dad (who died in his arms), and imagines the evocative outdoor scene. Davis wrote:
“His hands hovered over the keys. For a long time, he didn’t move. He could almost hear his father behind him, the old hunting jacket rustling, the smell of pipe tobacco lingering. He could almost he his mother humming in the kitchen far away. Finally, he whispered, ‘I don’t know if I made you proud, Daddy, but I have lived an interesting, interesting life. I hope I entertained you, if nothing else.' "
Part of the ending page reads:
“Tears streamed down BK’s face as his fingers flew. He played until the stars kindled above, until the first fireflies sparked among the stalks. Notes shimmered in the air long after he struck them, hanging like constellations in sound. And when he finally struck the last chord – a lingering minor resolved into a triumphant major – the field erupted in applause.”
“I cried so many times while writing this book,” Davis said in the interview. “I cried so many times because I was just connected with myself deep within, if that makes sense.”
Another emotional scene is in 2012, when Davis got a call out of the blue, giving him the honor of becoming the first Steinway artist in Iowa, and his dad wasn’t around to share that joy.
“The words hit like a sudden chord, sharp and radiant,” he wrote in “Invisible Secret.” “BK blinked hard, his chest tightening. He could barely breathe. For a long time, he felt like a ghost in his own life – used, doubted, trapped in shadows. Now here was light.”
“It was difficult not having him around because he was just such a regular part of my life, normally,” he said in this week’s interview. “When I realized my dad was gone, I tell you, I think I was out of it, mentally or whatever, for about six months to a year after his death because I had to restructure and reorganize my entire life.”
Writing in the third person gave Davis more distance to view himself more as a character in his own life story.
“By doing it in the third person, it gave me the space and the headroom, the headspace, to look at it in different ways,” he said. “And there's more space.”
Davis has dealt with mental health challenges over the years, and said that has informed his music.
“I've always been emotional. I think anyone who deals with music, you've got to have emotional intelligence in order to convey what you're trying to convey,” he said.
Davis publishes his music and books through his own company, Byday Publishing, which he formed in 1983 in Los Angeles.
“Because naturally I was hanging out with a lot of musicians and stuff like that. And Bobby Lyle, this great jazz pianist and he was also producer for Bette Midler and Anita Baker. Bobby told me, he said Byron, you ought to have your own publishing company to protect your music and to catalog it and keep it all organized,” he recalled. “He schooled me real quickly and downtown to whichever office it is you go to register your business, and that was the birth of Byday Publishing.”
Davis wrote the book following the release of the 11-track “Invisible Secret” album, available on Bandcamp HERE.
“The concept in and of itself is magical realism,” he said of the novel’s style. “I just fell in love with this thing and the story. And so I used a lot of my experiences from around the globe.”
He is based out of Belize City, Belize and is formulating new shows (including on July 4th in Belize) with a focus on the music of Prince, James Brown and Michael Jackson. The 90-minute shows will feature popular music by those artists with Davis’s interpretation and his original works sprinkled into the setlist.
Future performances are being planned for St. Kitts, Barbados and Panama. Davis said he isn’t sure when he will return home to Iowa.
You can order a copy of “Invisible Secret” on Amazon HERE.
This story was produced by WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. We rely on financial support from our listeners and readers to provide coverage of the issues that matter to the Quad Cities region and beyond. As someone who values the content created by WVIK's news department, please consider making a financial contribution to support our work.
