After initially being rejected from the Nelson Musical College in Cincinnati because he was black, Gussie L. Davis agreed to work as a janitor at the college for $15 a month in return for instruction. Davis's versatility was one of his most important qualities as a composer. He was able to compose songs that fit the most popular categories of performance: comic, sacred, or sentimental. In an article about the accomplishments of black composers, the Washington Post commented in 1904:

The most famous Negro composer of popular songs was Gussie L. Davis, now dead. And he never wrote a negro song — at least not one that made a hit. He belonged to the era of the "story song." "The Lighthouse by the Sea," "The Fatal Wedding," and "The Baggage Coach Ahead" were his. He was a performer too, and used to sing his own songs.⁶

Davis was the most-published black songwriter between 1880 and 1899, with over 200 of his songs published by twenty-four New York publishers, and by publishers in Cincinnati, Boston, and St. Louis.⁷ Of the difference in men's and women's reaction to song he remarked, "A woman buys it and sings it at home. She cannot sing a minstrel or Negro song in the parlor, and refined people would not allow it in the house...Love and mother songs are the taking songs."⁸ He wrote longer works including the musical A Hot Old Time in Dixie. Some of his most popular songs, The Fatal Wedding (1894), In the Baggage Coach Ahead (1896), and Won't You Take Me Back to Dixie (1899), Coming Home to Die (1898), Christmas in the Old Home (1897), My Creole Sue (1898) are part of the collection. After his death, minstrel songwriter Samuel Lucas wrote an elegy for Davis in the Freeman.