The Obituary of Henry Stuckey:
By Jacques Roche (Stephen Calt) for 78 Quarterly in 1968
Today's strange state of affairs, which brings the rural
blues singer acclaim for ethereal but earthy qualities he never intended to
cultivate, and then gives him a commercial brush-off, prevented the public
recognition due Henry Stuckey before his death on March 9, 1966.
Referring to
the gushy compliments and reviews that have beset him since his rediscovery,
Skip James once remarked: "You can't live off air puddings. Henry knows
that, too; he's too smart for these slicks who talk you into studying the music
racket again." At Mr. Criswell’s plantation in Satartia, Mississippi,
where Gayle Wardlow dis-covered him early in 1965, Henry Stuckey both laughed
off and shrugged at the concert success of his former protege, matter-of-factly
commenting: "I can play just like him."
Henry Stuckey, according to one who saw him play, had a
"beautiful, deep voice, but was so ugly I couldn't bear to watch him
long." Although it is difficult to asses the worth of a bluesman whose
music was never made public, Stuckey's reputation was such that H.C. Spiers,
when interviewed by Wardlow, still remembered him from the 1920's. Even at
that, none of his discoverer's overtures to record companies produced an
encouraging response.
"How old is this singer? In his sixties?" an
Electra secretary peevishly wanted to know. "Well, we can’t speculate on
every kid that comes along with a tape recorder; we backed one kid once and he
never found a single blues singer. Send a tape." Since word got around
that the Library of Congress' unctuous impresario paid only in cokes, blues
singers have also been unwilling to speculate on the promise of 'sending a
tape'. On the premise that even a `has-been' country blues artist merits closer
scrutiny than any would-be blues ' interpreter', the following data in regards to
Stuckey has been compiled by Gayle Wardlow and myself.
Henry Stuckey, born in the 1890’s, saw his first guitar
in 1904. A year later, he took up that instrument. Between 1907 and 1909, the young Skip James
wandered into a Bentonia Jukehouse to watch Stuckey and an older musician, Rich
Griffith (also deceased), accompany a fiddler who was playing Drunken Spree. Though that title is
still part of James repertoire, Stuckey had completely forgotten it some 55
years later. Upon his return from the war in 1917, Stuckey taught James how to
play guitar. The style he is said to have shown Skip was built around ragtime
pieces like Salty Dog ("The old
version") and Stack 0 Lee, all
played in the key of G. Soon, Stuckey was pirating Skip out of his house at
night, when, unbeknownst the James family, the pair played in nearby
barrel houses. Stuckey, who towered over his young partner, served as a general
bodyguard at such times.
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| Jimmy "Duck" Holmes at the grave of Henry Stuckey in 2017 |
As many as a dozen musicians worked around the Bentonia
area during that period (Stuckey himself had a brother, Shuke, who “played
better than Henry did.”) "I’d
follow them like the pied piper, all over town," Skip reports. James
learned some local pieces, including a version of Slidin’ Delta ("They’d have a real deep, sad sound even when
they were rapped or frailed"), and then quit playing guitar for a year to
"study" what he had seen and learned. From that point on James's
music—such as his early composition, All
Night Long—started .coming from "within," though some songs, like
I Looked Down the Road, still retain
an older, possibly local, touch.
The school of blues-playing developed by James on his
Paramount recordings could be designated “Bentonia,” for Skip, now falsely
billed as a “Delta” bluesman, adhered to no distinct regional style: e.g.
Delta. Only James and Blind Joe Reynolds, among the blues singers who count,
were so musically isolated. Both men were among the most eclectic of blues
singers. Whereas some blues singers like Tommy Johnson (whose Coal Black Mare,
a piece in Spanish tuning, was learned by Skip appeared in nearby Flora during
the early 1920s, the music played by Skip and Henry Stuckey never spread out of
Bentonia. Within Bentonia, both James and Stuckey set out to destroy all their
competition.
These two men performed whenever Skip happened to be in
town. ("I never got into anything or anyplace too deep or long; that's why
I reckon they call me Skip.") Both picked their Stella guitars with three
fingers and played in cross-note' tuning. When the first country blues records
came out, they “studied” some of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s pieces, as well as
those of later artists (like King Solomon Hill), but only for the purpose of “playing
them better.” Today, Skip will reluctantly perform a few such acquired pieces,
like Jack O’ Diamonds.
In neighboring towns like Pocahontas, James was not
adverse, Stuckey recalled, to singing his blues on Saturday night and going "up
the road" to preach on Sunday. Neither married man stayed home at night:
"We treated our wives in any kind of way," said Stuckey. Both readily
acknowledged their excessive drinking: "I was trying to be a 'man,’ so
quite naturally I was a habitual drunkard," James said. According to James, Stuckey was an expert and wily
crapshooter: “I never would join a game with Henry when he shot those craps
with strangers.” In his own right, Stuckey was an entrepreneur who would,
rather than hire himself out to house parties (at which food and admission prices
made up the musician's fee), rake in the entire profit from his own parties in
Sartartia. “He’d do most anything to get out of work. Henry always liked to
take it easy—you'd always find him out hunting or fishing somewhere."
Stuckey, in turn, when asked if Skip worked as a
youngster, replied, "His mother sure did. Hah!" The personal attitude
of each rediscovered man towards the other was totally patronizing, and
somewhat conspiratorial in matters pertaining to music and other Bentonians.
Skip, when referring past local violence directed against himself, would
validate his remarks by saying: "Henry Stuckey could tell you about
it." Stuckey, on the other hand, would only snicker at Wardlow's
then-relayed accounts.
Even when James made the Bentonia scene, their respective
sidelines often sundered the pair. However, Stuckey was able to con-firm the
fact that Skip's Cherry Ball was
composed at his Grafton session. He was familiar with many of Skip's
compositions, like Cypress Grove and Devil Got My Woman, a piece he said had
been once known locally as Devil's Dream.
He remembered Skip's unrecorded Crow Jane
and Catfish ("an old song") from the 1920's. Of Special Rider, he said: "A woman died while singing that
song." While Stuckey knew little about the development of Skip's piano
style, he sometimes backed up his piano-playing on guitar.
During the 1930s, Stuckey ran a barrelhouse in the
Mississippi Delta ("He got as far as Belzoni," said Skip). At that
time, he met Charley Patton, whose style, he, unlike James, personally
appreciated.
In 1935, James came back from Texas and happened to pass
by a party at which Stuckey was playing. Although Skip had, for the most part,
quit playing blues since his recording session, he teamed up with Stuckey that
night. Earlier that same day, Stuckey said, someone had recorded him. No record
of a Stuckey session exists. James remembered that particular house party, but
maintained that his own involvement was minimal and that, not having wished to
"make a show" or intrude on Stuckey's performance, he tactfully
waited until other Bentonians threw a party in his honor before playing in
public.
James soon went on to Alabama but, in the late 1940s,
returned to Bentonia with his second wife, and once again took up blues-singing
with Stuckey. Henry s cousin, "Sport" Stuckey, threw parties every
Friday night at which the two entertained, while James' cousin, Lincoln (Buddy)
Polk of Yazoo, ran a cafe in Bentonia which featured both men. Another cousin
of Stuckey’s, Burd Slater, also played locally and performed some of their
songs, although James reports that he had a predilection for "Muddy Waters’
stuff." Stuckey and James also
accepted invitations from friends to play for nearby Delta parties. Once,
Stuckey recounted, both men saw Kid Bailey playing in a Delta barrelhouse,
though the incident is not remembered by Skip.
Soon, Stuckey was advising James to go up North, where
musical opportunities seemed greater. To James this meant living in a
'reprobated’ city like Chicago which he felt should be ‘wiped off the map'.
Nevertheless James, who disliked his job residency in Sartartia, suddenly left with
his wife in the early 1950s. Yet, tiring of the travelling required of a
musician, he then abandoned-his-brief comeback altogether. Stuckey in turn went
up to Omaha and found work as a band guitarist. They never met again.
At the time of his discovery by Wardlow, Stuckey was
living in a barren, one-room shack with his wife, daughter, and grandchild.
("I imagine his luck must have struck tough in the North.") Blandly,
Stuckey indicated that his Delta barrelhouse operation had netted him more
money than his Omaha career. Despite a plantation strike in ‘tense’ Leland
which took place at the time of one interview, Stuckey remained characteristically
relaxed. His affable and reserved demeanor suggested that of a Delta rather
than a Yazoo County resident. In discussing his erstwhile friend; the older man
didn't seem to believe in or comprehend Skip's transformation from his
comprehend days on the Whitehead plantation. Just the same, Stuckey, while
lacking James' ambition to travel, record, and take up the ministry,
nevertheless exhibited the same detachment from his surroundings and
contemporaries which made Skip, by his own description, "an odd fellow.'
Puffing on a cigar, Stuckey, who had kept up with James'
career through the `grapevine' (Skip's cousin in Yazoo), stated, " I' like
to meet him again. I was up in the Delta in the fifties and heard somebody
playing .22-20 in a house. When I went inside, I only found a phonograph
record."
Skip James, who "wouldn't play in Bentonia again for $10 a
minute," had, just before receiving news of Stuckey.'s death, been
discussing an eventual visit to Sartartia to see him.
