Mac Davis, Pop and Country Singing Star, Is Dead at 78

After writing hits for Elvis Presley and others, he became famous in his own right with songs like the No. 1 hit “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me.”

The singer and songwriter Mac Davis in 1973. His songwriting revealed a debt to both the sunny humanism of 1967’s Summer of Love and the candid sensuality of the sexual revolution that accompanied it.

Mr. Davis enjoyed early success as a songwriter in the late 1960s, supplying Presley with Top 10 pop hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” after spending much of the decade working in sales and publishing for independent record companies.

“I Believe in Music” was recorded by scores of artists and became Mr. Davis’s signature song; he closed his concerts with it for decades. “Watching Scotty Grow,” another of his best-known compositions.

Singing in a warm, resonant baritone, Mr. Davis recorded many of these originals himself, working in a Southern pop vein akin to that of Presley, whom he often cited, and his fellow Lubbock, Texas, native Buddy Holly, whom he called his greatest musical influence.

“He was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” Mr. Davis said in an interview with the website Elvis Australia about the first time he saw Presley perform onstage, in a parking lot at the county fairgrounds in Lubbock. “Of course, I was just a kid, you know,” Mr. Davis went on. “So was he.” Genial, photogenic and fit, Mr. Davis had his own television variety hour, “The Mac Davis Show,” from 1974 to 1976 on NBC and was a regular guest on “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows in those years. He made his acting debut in the 1979 movie “North Dallas Forty,” a comedy that starred Nick Nolte as an aging football star and Mr. Davis as a calculating quarterback.

Mr. Davis’s songwriting in the late 1960s and early ’70s was a product of that era, revealing a debt to both the sunny humanism of 1967’s Summer of Love and the candid sensuality of the sexual revolution that accompanied it. “In the Ghetto” — inspired by Mr. Davis’s experience with a childhood playmate, the 5-year-old son of one of his father’s Black co-workers — conveyed empathy and depth in speaking to racial inequities.

“I really thought I was going to change the world with that song,” Mr. Davis said of “In the Ghetto” in a 2017. “I was very proud of it. But unfortunately, with the way things are today, the song is probably more poignant now than when I wrote it.”

Morris Mac Davis was born on Jan. 21, 1942, in Lubbock, the second of three children. He and his sister, Linda, spent their childhood living in an efficiency apartment complex with their father, T.J., a building contractor, after their parents divorced; his brother, Kim, grew up in Atlanta with their mother, Edith.

Mr. Davis’s first guitar was a gift from his father when he was 9 years old. But he was less interested in music than in sports and fist-fighting until he finished high school and moved in with his mother in Atlanta, where he started a rock ’n’ roll group called the Zots.

He moved to Liberty Records in the mid-1960s and was soon transferred to Hollywood, where he worked for the label’s publishing division before leaving to join Boots Enterprises, the production and publication company owned by Nancy Sinatra.

While working for Ms. Sinatra, he played on her studio recordings and in her stage shows. He also began publishing his own songs and persuading Presley and other artists to record them.

He left Boots Enterprises in 1970, shortly after meeting the Columbia Records executive Clive Davis and signing a recording contract with the label. He had his first major hit with “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” two years later. Mr. Davis had only four Top 40 pop hit singles with Columbia. But by the mid-1970s he had become more of a force on the country chart, where he had 16 Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hit “Hooked on Music,” between 1972 and 1985.

His work as an actor also gained momentum as the ’80s progressed, including roles in the Hollywood movies “Cheaper to Keep Her” (1981) and “The Sting II” (1983), as well as appearances on TV shows like “The Muppet Show” and “King of the Hill.”

He was honored as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998. Two years later he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006.

Mr. Davis in 2014. By the mid-1970s he had become a force on the country chart, where he had 16 Top 40 singles between 1972 and 1985.

Mr. Davis is survived by his wife of 38 years, Lise (Gerard) Davis; their two sons, Noah Claire and Cody Luke; another son, Joel Scott, from his first marriage; a sister, Linda; his mother; and a granddaughter.

Most accounts of Mr. Davis’s childhood cite his passion for sports and fisticuffs as the reason he ignored the guitar his father gave him as a Christmas present when he was a boy. A 1980 profile in People magazine, though, suggested that it wasn’t the guitar, but his father’s choice of models, that gave Mr. Davis pause.

He “saved up, bless his heart, and bought me a Hawaiian steel guitar, the exact opposite of what I wanted,” Mr. Davis explained. “I tried to act like I loved it,” he went on, “but I almost cried.”

Mac Davis died on Tuesday after undergoing heart surgery. He was 78 years old.