Larry Davis came up in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was born on December 4, 1936. The city sat at a crossroads of American musical traditions, and Davis would go on to make his mark within one of the most enduring of them — the blues.

Over the course of his career, Davis worked as a singer, guitarist, and songwriter, channeling his craft through the blues genre. He built his identity around all three of those roles, not simply performing songs but writing them, and not simply writing them but delivering them with his own voice and guitar. The Library of Congress Name Authority recognizes him under the authorized label "Davis, Larry, 1936–1994," a designation that places him within the documented record of American musical figures. Though the facts available don't detail a long list of specific recordings or collaborators, his standing as a blues musician and songwriter points to a working life spent in service of the form.

Davis died on April 19, 1994, in Los Angeles, California. He had traveled some distance from his Kansas City origins, and Los Angeles was where his life came to its close. He was fifty-seven years old. The arc from his Missouri birthplace to his California death takes in the broader geography of American blues, a music that itself moved and shifted across the country's regions throughout the twentieth century. What the record preserves of Davis is the outline of a working musician — a singer, a guitarist, a songwriter — who spent his life inside that tradition.