Jimmie Houston Davis. Leading the crowd in singing "You Are My Sunshine" at his inaugural ball in Baton Rouge, La., 1960. Courtesy of AP Images.

Davis, Jimmie Houston (11 Sept. 1899-5 Nov. 2000), governor of Louisiana and musician, was born near Beech Springs, in Jackson Parish, Louisiana, the son of Samuel Jones Davis, a sharecropper, and Sarah Elizabeth Works. He grew up in a two-room shack. As a boy he worked alongside his family in the cotton fields that surrounded his home. Until he was nine, he slept on the floor.

Early on, young Davis saw education as a way out of his impoverished circumstances. After finishing grade school at Beech Springs, he attended high school in Winfield, Louisiana. Upon graduation in 1920, he journeyed to New Orleans--his clothes tied together in a bedsheet attached to a stick--to begin his studies at Soule Business College. He continued his college career at Louisiana College, in Pineville, earning a bachelor's degree in history in 1924. While in college he worked at various small jobs, often as not singing and playing the guitar for his supper; he would maintain an intense interest in music and performing during his long life. Davis's odyssey in education concluded in 1926, when he earned a master's degree in education at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. After a brief stint teaching in public schools, in 1927 Davis landed a position teaching history and social studies at Dodd College, a women's institution located in Shreveport. He gave up his teaching career to take a position as a clerk of court in Shreveport a year later.

During his time in Shreveport, Davis continued playing his guitar and singing whenever possible. A self-taught musician, he could neither read nor write music, nor did he have any formal knowledge of chord structure. But he had a good ear, and he could reproduce a tune on the guitar after hearing it a couple of times. In the mid-1920s he began writing songs--he would eventually write more than eight hundred--and singing weekly on KWKH, the local Shreveport radio station. A talent scout from RCA Victor chanced to hear him on a Friday night and invited him to Memphis, where he made some sample recordings. Davis signed a contract with Victor in 1929 and during the next five years recorded nearly sixty songs, influenced by the yodeling style of Jimmie Rodgers as well as by the local African American blues musicians with whom Davis recorded, including the guitarist Oscar Woods. Davis was one of the first white musicians to create recorded music with a mixed group. In 1934 Davis moved to Decca records.

In 1936 Davis married Alverna Adams, who came from a prominent Shreveport family; the couple had one son. In early 1940 Davis and his collaborator, Charles Mitchell, purchased the song "You are My Sunshine" from its original author, Paul Rice; they recorded it on 5 February 1940. It became Davis's most famous hit and remained his signature song for the rest of his life. Davis also began acting in B-grade movies. In the late 1940s Davis moved to the new Capitol label, but he returned to Decca after a few years and began recording gospel songs. In his music, Davis always stayed close to his folk roots, once explaining, "I haven't gone uptown with my music because I think you'd better stay close to home." He performed annually at the Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville, with a final appearance in 1994 at the age of 95.

In 1942 Davis served in his first elected position, commissioner of public safety in Shreveport. He had run as an independent Democrat, a political stance he maintained during his various electoral quests. His easygoing manner and lack of political pretension impressed some of the state's political leaders who were anti-Longites--those opposed to the former governor and U.S. senator Huey Long and his allies. Davis was tapped to run for governor in 1944 as an anti-Longite candidate to succeed the reform-minded Sam Jones, who had served from 1940 to1944. Running a campaign heavy on music and singing and light on issue-oriented speechmaking, Davis prevailed over the Longite ticket, represented by the former U.S. representative Lewis Morgan and Huey's brother, Earl Long.

Once in office, Davis continued his low-key approach to politics. He had inherited a state boasting of healthy revenues as a result of wartime spending, and Davis worked hard to create a balanced budget. He increased spending for schools and for numerous public works and also built several new colleges. Under his leadership the legislature passed a state employees' retirement system and raised the benefits for the Louisiana old-age pension. Just as important, Davis successfully promoted the idea that anyone who wished to drive an automobile in Louisiana must be licensed. Despite these accomplishments, Davis was often absent from the state, performing his music or acting in movies. Nevertheless, he left office in 1948 held in high regard by his constituents and with the state treasury in surplus.

In 1960 Davis once again entered the political fray and was returned to the governor's mansion. This was a different era in Louisiana politics, as the state sought to stem the tide of desegregation that was flowing across the Deep South as a result of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Davis supported the segregationist cause and signed legislation to give local school boards the power to determine how they would respond to desegregation pressures from the district court. The newly passed laws, however, were promptly declared unconstitutional by the same district court, and eventually African American students began integrating the city schools. Despite his stance on the issue, Davis was never regarded as a hard-core segregationist. He had spent years working with African American musicians, which gave him a more enlightened view of race in his state. Nevertheless, he did not actively resist the segregationists in his state. Given the acrimony of the racial issues that flared up during his second term in office, Davis's popularity declined. This decline was assisted by Davis's decision to build--at the state's expense--a huge new governor's mansion, complete with twelve bedrooms and eighteen bathrooms. He also supported construction of two new bridges over the Mississippi that were deemed unnecessary at the time, although their merit was more apparent in later years. Davis left office for the second time with a much diminished level of popular support.

Davis's wife died from cancer in 1967, and the next year Davis married Anna Carter Gordon, a gospel singer in the Chuck Wagon Gang of Nashville. In 1971 Davis made another run for the 1972 gubernatorial nomination but this time did not fare well in the primary and consequently retired from politics. In 1972 he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. During the next two decades he lived quietly in retirement in Baton Rouge, playing his music as often as he could. In 1977 the Louisiana legislature decreed that "You are My Sunshine" would share honors as the state song with Doralice Fontane's "Give Me Louisiana."

Jimmie Davis's life reflected the intertwining of music and politics. He played music because he loved it; he served as governor because he believed it was the right thing to do as a citizen of his beloved Louisiana. But his affection for his music always outweighed his affection for politics. He was an unconventional politician in a state in which unconventional politics was the norm. For Jimmie Davis, his music always came first.

Jimmie Davis's papers can be found at the Louisiana State Archives, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. An obituary appears in the New York Times, 6 Nov. 2000. An uncritical biography is Gus Weill's You Are My Sunshine: The Jimmie Davis Story, an Affectionate Biography (1977). Davis's first term of governor is well covered in Jerry Purvis Sanson's Louisiana during World War II: Politics and Society, 1939-1945 (1999).