According to her website, Rachael Davis has been playing music since she was “jingling ankle bells in perfect time on her months old feet.” Well, considering she grew up in a home surrounded by music, that can be easy to believe.

“I come from a musical family,” she said in a phone interview with Whatzup from her home in Nashville, Tennessee. “Both of my parents were music teachers and old-time musicians. We were pretty well steeped in the Midwest musical community. We went to all the music festivals. It was a really great upbringing. Lots and lots of music.”

Ever since her little kicking legs were keeping the beat, Davis has been making music.

“I like to tell people that the only ‘real’ job I’ve ever had was the summer when I was 18 years old in my hometown of Cadillac, Michigan,” she said. “I drove the beverage cart at the golf course. It was me and my two best friends that ran the Snack Shack and drove the beverage cart out at McGuire’s Resort (now Evergreen Golf Resort).”

Since then, she’s become a regular in Fort Wayne, with her latest performance being at The Garden during the April in The Garden. Her next visit comes Saturday, Jan. 25, when she will be accompanied by R.O. Shapiro at Baker Street Centre with local opening act Bobcat Opossum.

Born to play music

Those jingling bells may have been her introduction to music, but it was when she learned to speak that things really took off.

“My first ‘instrument’ was voice,” she said of singing in the family band Lake Effect, performing in music festivals across Michigan. “I started singing with mom and dad during their performances when I was like 2. Then, when I was 9, I started taking piano classes. That was my very first instrument.

“When I was 13, I wanted to learn to play guitar, and I got one for Christmas. Even though my dad was the guy who gave everyone guitar lessons in our town, he and my mom thought our friend Carrie, who’s a lady, would be more official, since someone else would be giving me guitar lessons.”

However, those lessons did not go well. She stuck with it a couple years, but says she became so discouraged at 15 years old that her father stepped in with an idea.

“My dad, who is an incredible clawhammer banjo player, one of the best, he was like, ‘I wonder if banjo is your instrument.’ So, he sat me down and put his banjo in my lap and showed me how to play clawhammer banjo,” she said. “I really took to that. So, banjo was my first stringed instrument.”

Since then, her string collection has grown. She’ll have her banjo, guitar, tenor guitar, and ukulele with her at Baker Street Centre.

All of those instruments will come in handy for a lady that will not be pinned down to a genre.

“I span a few genres,” she said. “It’s traditional American folk, old-time music like banjo tunes, but I also love blues and gospel. But my favorite is jazz and early 20th century pop music like Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Broadway stuff. I play some of that stuff on my ukelele and tenor guitar.”

It’s those later sounds that will get their time to shine at Baker Street Centre with Shapiro.

“(He) is originally from Long Island, so he’s an old-school theater kid,” Davis said. “He was the kid who was obsessed with Gregory Hines and Saivon Glover. He learned tap dancing and was the tap-dancing theater kid.”

So, while Shapiro is shining with his musical prowess — “He’s a great guitar player and is a real soulful singer who writes beautiful songs” — he’ll also put do some tap dancing.

“He was like, ‘I’ve always tried to find a way to incorporate tap dancing into my show, but it’s not been possible,’ ” Davis said about Shapiro, whom she met a couple years ago at Blissfest in Petoskey, Michigan. “I was like, ‘Well, now it is!’

“It’s so fun. It’s like a street performer in New Orleans.”

Lifelong Relationships

Davis’ Fort Wayne days stem back to her 2001 album, Minor League Deities. 

With a management team behind her, the album was distributed to many radio stations, with Fort Wayne’s WBOI among them. That’s how Brad Etter, a 2011 recipient of Whatzup’s Liddell Award, heard about her and booked her to open for a Patty Larkin show at Toast & Jam on Wayne Street on Jan. 26, 2003. 

Two months later, she was back in town for another show at Toast & Jam with Fort Wayne’s Sunny Taylor opening for her.

“He treated us like we were royalty,” Davis said of Etter, who was running BEtter Productions at the time. “He was so nice and made sure we had everything we needed. When he left the room, my guitar player was like, ‘Are you sure he doesn’t have you mixed up with Celine Dion or something?’ He was treating us so well and so special.”

That experience resulted in lasting relationships.

“The people I met there that evening — everyone was just so familiar and friendly,” Davis said. “We just had a great time. We stayed at the house and stayed up late with everybody. Most people, Fort Wayniacs I call them, who I met that evening became lifelong friends. 

“There was even one Christmas when Brad and the late, great Dave Karthol came up to my mom and dad’s house for Christmas dinner one year. 

“My dad makes curry every year instead of turkey. He grew up in India, so that was our Christmas dinner. I had been talking about it so much that one year Brad was interested and I was like, ‘You know what? I bet you could come to the Indian feast.’ So, he and Dave drove up on Christmas day.”

Living room to stardom

While speaking with Davis, her musical reach came into focus based on the heavy hitters she rubs shoulders with.

First, my eye was caught by the description in the Baker Street Centre writeup for the show that Davis was “hot off dates with superstar Billy Strings.” So, seeing she had played alongside one of the hottest names in the music industry, I had to find out what that was all about.

“Billy’s from central Michigan, and when he was 19-20, he was living in Traverse City,” she said. “His music partner was an old friend of my parents, Don Julin, a mandolin player. My mom and dad hosted a monthly music jam at their house when I was growing up, and still actually do to this day. So, Don would bring Billy to the jams before he was Billy Strings. This was when he had real short hair and would wear white buttoned up shirts, buttoned all the way to the top, and wear a bowtie.

“We moved down here (to Nashville) in 2012 because my husband (Dominic John Davis) grew up with Jack White and plays bass for him,” she subtly added about her husband performing with another musical icon. “So, we moved here because his band is based here. But when we moved down here, the only other Michigan musicians we knew were Jack and Dominic’s Detroit people. A few years after we moved down here, Lindsay Lou did too. And a couple years after that is when Billy moved down here.

“It’s impossible to wrap my brain around his star rising, because he is a freaking superstar. We just did this Halloween show with him. He’s just that kid. I feel like he’s my little brother or something. It’s just the kid that came with his flatpicking guitar in my mom and dad’s living room.”

The relationships she’s established in Fort Wayne and with music superstars goes to show the kind of community that folk music establishes.

“I was reading Peter Yarrow’s (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) obituary and his statement about him choosing folk music is that community,” she said. “It is about your neighbors and the people you relate to. It’s about relating to your community. I read that, and I was like, ‘Yeah.’ ”