When I was a kid, I was Sammy Davis Jr. before I was anyone else. I started my entertainment career as a tap dancer. That was what led to my first appearance on television, in Philadelphia on KYW-TV. I was 5 years old. Later that day, the parents of other dancers and talent-show participants complained that my afro had covered up their kids on-screen.
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In some sense, Sammy and I were knit together from that moment on. I grew up in the 1970s, the end of the golden age of the variety show, which you could also call the second (or third) golden age of Sammy Davis Jr. If you turned on the TV, he would be there, singing “The Candy Man,” singing “Mr. Bojangles.” I have specific memories of him performing with Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson. He was an actor as well, who would pop up, almost always playing himself, on sitcoms such as All in the Family (where he famously kissed Archie Bunker) and Chico and the Man (he covered José Feliciano’s theme song), and in dramas including Charlie’s Angels. He was also on soap operas such as One Life to Live and, slightly later, General Hospital, though not as himself: He played the con artist Chip Warren on the first and a recovering alcoholic father named Eddie Phillips on the second. Sammy was a presence everywhere. Even “The Candy Man,” sung by a children’s choir and used to sell M&M’s, pointed back to Sammy.
Sammy gave me one of my first serious lessons in life, which was about death. He was on some show doing “Mr. Bojangles,” and I got the hang of it and sang along. After his performance, I had a little talk with my mother. There’s a lyric where he says that “his dog up and died,” and I was unclear on the concept. I had lost my grandparents at that point, but what did that mean, really? Where were they? She talked it through with me, and I understood, as best as I could at age 2 or whatever (which maybe is better than I understand it now, even).
Another serious lesson I learned from Sammy was about consequences, intended and unintended. A longtime supporter of John F. Kennedy’s, Sammy was disinvited from performing at the president’s inaugural ball soon after marrying the white Swedish actor May Britt. (In a memoir, the couple’s daughter, Tracey Davis, said that her parents’ interracial marriage was the reason for the snub.) Sensing an opportunity, Richard Nixon later sought out Sammy’s advice on issues of race and poverty, and Sammy endorsed him for president in 1972 (the year after I was born). Every Black person has an uncle who is hard-core about racial justice, and mine was equally hard-core in his disapproval of Sammy’s choice. He wasn’t alone. Julian Bond, who was then in the Georgia state legislature, said that the decision was “unbelievable.” But people believed it, and withdrew their goodwill because of it.
Yet Sammy didn’t shrink from the Nixon controversy. In the 1973 movie Save the Children, which documents a fundraising concert for Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH (showcasing stars such as Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, and the Jackson 5), he stepped right into it. He knew that a cultural firing squad was waiting for him, and he told the audience that he understood they were disappointed. It wasn’t an apology, which made it even more compelling. He was accounting for himself. And then he sang “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” which really put a stamp on it. (The last ballot he cast for president, I should note, was for Jesse Jackson, in 1988.)
Sammy, born a century ago this year, had to be himself, but who was that? Balancing an internal identity with a public persona is not easy for anyone, so imagine how hard it was for him. Sammy was a showbiz kid almost from birth. His father was in vaudeville, and, as a result, so was Sammy. He debuted at age 3 and never stopped, appearing on stages and television, in nightclubs and movies. As a singer, he started with covers, including of Jimmy Durante’s novelty song “Inka Dinka Doo,” and had hits right out of the Great American Songbook: Johnny Mercer’s “Something’s Gotta Give,” Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic,” Anthony Newley and Al Jolson songs. He embraced the spirit of all of this—pure entertainment, showman stuff. Sammy, day in and day out, had to be on.
Think of the history churning inside him, the way he had to have one foot here and one foot there as he moved forward, missteps awaiting him. I knew about Sammy’s relationships, including his affair with the actor Kim Novak, and I was aware that this was a time when interracial romances were frowned upon. He would go on, of course, to marry Britt. (In my house, the most famous member of Sammy’s family was probably his third wife, Altovise, a dancer and an activist who appeared with Sammy on game shows such as Tattletales and was the star of an Afro-Sheen television commercial.) And I knew about his complex spiritual journey: He was raised Christian, converted to Judaism in his mid-30s, and later became an honorary warlock in the Church of Satan. (Whew.)
Was Sammy a positive force? Was he a token? Was he being manipulated as a way of taking the focus off wider, more pernicious forms of racism? Sammy was a person who, for his survival, for his benefit—but also to his detriment—had to live as a celebrity, as a performer, which doesn’t leave much time for investigating such questions. In some television interviews, Sammy let down his guard and reflected, but they tended to come later in his career, in long-form sit-downs with Larry King and Arsenio Hall. And even then, he held back. He was part of a circle of older, more circumspect Black entertainers who connected the ’70s and the ’80s to an earlier era—a circle that included Redd Foxx and Scatman Crothers: comedian-actor-musicians who had started in nightclubs and speakeasies and moved on to radio, albums, and the growing medium of television.
Sammy Davis Jr. with Harvey Korman and Carol Burnett in a 1975 episode of The Carol Burnett Show. (CBS Photo Archive / Getty)
Those interviews were some of my first looks at him. I looked again when YouTube came along: Sammy was one of the earliest examples of a viral YouTube star. There are videos of him tap-dancing at age 8 or so, not much older than when I first tapped, except he was 50,000 times better. (There are videos of him drumming as well—one of his secret skills—and though he wasn’t 50,000 times better, he was very good.)
Three things happened when I saw those videos. First of all, I saw how electric he was, how he had complete control over every aspect of his arsenal of entertainment skills. Second of all, I realized that this was a slightly different Sammy from the one I had seen on variety shows. When he was on Dinah Shore’s show or The Tonight Show, he would dance and sing and throw off a line or two, but it wasn’t the pure, concentrated thing that these YouTube performances were. Finally, I saw more clearly the relationship between him and the most electric entertainer of my lifetime, Michael Jackson. I had heard that a teenage Michael had come to Sammy for pointers, but I didn’t fully appreciate the history behind that, the other dancers and nightclub performers and vaudevillians who were wrapped up in what Sammy represented to Michael and what Michael carried forward.
And then there was my discovery of his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can, written with his longtime friends Jane and Burt Boyar. In straightforward and compelling prose, Sammy, then 40, tells the story of his vaudeville beginnings, his growth as an entertainer, and his movement through America. That year, at a Book and Author Luncheon, he gave a riveting talk, opening up completely about racial identity, religious discrimination, and social (in)justice, as well as the importance of writing the memoir:
You don’t know how frustrating it is to believe something sincerely and deeply in your heart and have to joke about it to be able to make it acceptable. The frustration of not belonging to either part of the color spectrum, neither being fish nor fowl, having your own people despise you, having the people you have adopted suspect you, to walk into a synagogue on the High Holy Days and hear the laughter and the snickering because they’re not fully aware that you’re sincere. How do you explain that? How do you penetrate that? Or to walk out of the house with your wife and hear a group of guys say—of your own color, incidentally—say “He thinks he’s white.”
The memoir was a chance to “cleanse, in part, my emotional soul,” he said. That tone—of pain, of surprise, of a stubborn refusal to be reduced or diminished—is everywhere in it. Sammy may have talked about being stuck between Black and white, between Christian and Jewish, but his existence joined one side to the other, not to mention pointing beyond a past of separation and stereotype.
Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr.
By Sammy Davis, Jr., Jane Boyar, and Burt Boyar, with a new foreword by Questlove
I opened with a memory of being on television, and in pure showbiz fashion, I will end with one, too. In 1988, when I was 17, my father’s group, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, appeared on Jerry Lewis’s Labor Day telethon. Also on the telethon that year: Sammy Davis Jr. We didn’t share a stage, exactly, but I have a faint memory of seeing him walking around backstage. Sammy was only in his early 60s at the time but he looked older to me, closer to 80. He was a year away from the throat-cancer diagnosis that led to radiation therapy (he chose it to protect his voice) and, when that failed, the removal of his larynx, a loss for him that was in some ways as devastating as actual death.
Sammy died on May 16, 1990. On that same day, a world away, Ice Cube was releasing his debut solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Years later, after he’d appeared in such films as Boyz n the Hood and Friday, he told an interviewer, “There was a time you couldn’t get a job if you couldn’t sing and dance. I mean, there was Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley—musicians, singers have always done movies.”
By the 1990s, what was considered entertainment in America was changing. It had already changed, and would continue to change. Vaudeville gave way to Vegas and nightclubs, which gave way to television. Genres changed. Faces changed. Sammy stood in the middle of it for so long, watched it all spin around him as he spun through it. “I’ve gotta be me,” he sang, and he was.
This article was adapted from Questlove’s foreword for the reissue of Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography Yes I Can. It appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The One and Only Sammy.”
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