Remembering Spencer Davis

• Spencer Davis, the veteran British rock musician and leader of eponymous Spencer Davis Group, famous for such mid-1960s classics as “Gimme Some Lovin'” and “I’m a Man,” died Monday, Oct. 19 while being treated for pneumonia, his agent told the BBC. He was 81 years old.

As Variety‘s Jem Aswad reports, what made the Spencer Davis Group unique, much like the Dave Clark 5 and the J. Geils Band, the band’s namesake was not the singer or frontman. In the case of Davis (right), his band’s success rested upon the unique vocal talents of a teenaged Steve Winwood (second from left), who he discovered performing, along with his brother, Muff, in a Birmingham pub in 1963 and convinced them to form a band with him, with Winwood’s soaring voice and rousing keyboard playing at the center. Performing a steady repertoire of R&B covers, the Spencer Davis Group quickly developed a following, performed frequently in London and signed with Fontana Records, releasing a string of Top 10 British hits, beginning in 1966 with “Keep on Running,” and continuing in 1967 with “Somebody Help Me,” “I’m A Man” and “Gimme Some Lovin'” — the latter two were also hits in the U.S. and were later covered by Chicago and the Blues Brothers, respectively.

Later in 1967, the Winwood brothers left the group — Steve went off and formed Traffic with guitarist Dave Mason and drummer Jim Capaldi; Muff became a successful record executive; and producer/co-writer Jimmy Miller also left and went on to work with Traffic and later, the Rolling Stones. Davis kept the group going for another two years, reforming it again in 1973 after he moved to California. Davis also worked as an A&R executive for Island Records in the ’70s. He went on to lead various incarnations of the Spencer Davis Group, recording intermittently over the ensuing decades and touring regularly as recently as 2017.