The Obituary of Henry Stuckey:

The Obituary of Henry Stuckey:

By Jacques Roche (Stephen Calt) for 78 Quarterly in 1968

The military marker of Henry Stuckey at
Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, 
 Bentonia, Yazoo County, Mississippi

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.

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.

CeDell Davis, 91, Dies Sep 27, 2017

CeDell Davis, 91, Dies Sep 27, 2017
Jon Pareles - The New York Times

CeDell Davis, a Delta bluesman from Arkansas who used a knife for a guitar slide, died on Wednesday. 

He was 91.

His Facebook page confirmed the death. He had been hospitalized since Sept. 24 after a heart attack.

Mr. Davis spent decades performing around the South at juke joints and house parties before a broader audience got a chance to hear his electrified rural blues in the 1980s.

His voice was a grainy moan as he sang about woman troubles and hard luck; his guitar could drive dancers with boogie and shuffle beats or play leads that were lean and gnarled, gliding smoothly and then coiling into a dissonant sting.

After childhood polio constricted his hands, he developed his own technique of using a knife along the fretboard of his guitar. The New York Times critic Robert Palmer called it “a guitar style that is utterly unique, in or out of the blues."

 Mr. Davis was born Ellis CeDell Davis in Helena, Ark., on June 9, 1926, though some sources say it was 1927. His mother was known as a faith healer, and his father ran a juke joint. Although his mother thought the blues was devil’s music, he took to the style early, starting on diddley-bow, a one-stringed instrument made by nailing a wire to a wall. He moved on to harmonica and guitar, often sneaking into juke joints to listen to music.

He contracted polio when he was 10, leaving him with partly paralyzed arms and legs and requiring crutches to walk. But he was determined to stay with music. He told Mr. Palmer: “I was right-handed, but I couldn’t use my right hand, so I had to turn my guitar around. I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kind of swiped one of them."

He reinvented his playing using the handle of a table knife. “Almost everything that you could do with your hands, I could do it with the knife,” he told David Ramsey this year in the magazine The Oxford American. “It’s all in the way you handle it. Drag, slide, push it up and down."

As a teenager, Mr. Davis played street corners and juke joints around Helena, which at the time was a bustling Mississippi River port, “wide open” with gamblers, bootleggers and honky-tonks, Mr. Davis recalled in the 1984 documentary Blues Back Home.

There he met some of the era’s leading blues musicians and started appearing on two live blues radio shows on KFFA in Helena: “King Biscuit Time” with Sonny Boy Williamson and “Bright Star Flour” with Robert Nighthawk, a fellow slide guitarist. From 1953 to 1963, he and Mr. Nighthawk performed together, and they moved for a time to St. Louis.

Mr. Davis was further disabled in 1957 when he was trampled after a brandished gun led to a stampede at an East St. Louis bar where he and Mr. Nighthawk were performing. Multiple leg fractures left him using a wheelchair.

In “Blues Back Home,” Mr. Davis said, “Whether I could walk or not, I had to make my place in this world, and find my own way, and I found it.”

He continued to work the juke-joint circuit. In the early 1960s he moved to Pine Bluff, Ark., where he would live for decades until moving to a nursing home in Hot Springs, Ark. He made his first recordings in 1976 for the journalist and folklorist Louis Guida; they appeared on the 1983 collection Keep It to Yourself: Arkansas Blues Volume 1, Solo Performances.

Those recordings reached Mr. Palmer, who went to hear Mr. Davis at Delta juke joints in the early 1980s. In The Times in 1981, Mr. Palmer wrote about a juke-joint gig in Little Rock, calling Mr. Davis “a virtuoso with the table knife.”

He continued, “The scraping of the knife along the strings of his bright yellow electric guitar makes a kind of metallic gnashing sound that conspires with his patched-together guitar amplifier and his utterly original playing technique to produce some of the grittiest music imaginable.”

Mr. Palmer befriended and championed Mr. Davis, drawing attention to him. Soon Mr. Davis was working the national and international blues circuit. Some listeners complained that he was out of tune, but Mr. Palmer observed that Mr. Davis played in a consistent, precise “alternate tuning system.”

Mr. Palmer eventually brought Mr. Davis to the Mississippi label Fat Possum and produced his 1994 debut album, “Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong.”

Mick Jagger and Yoko Ono attended Mr. Davis’s first gigs in New York City, in 1982. Other musicians became admirers and collaborators. The guitarist Peter Buck, from R.E.M., and the drummer Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees were in Mr. Davis’s studio band for his 2002 album, “When Lightnin’ Struck the Pine.”

Mr. Davis had a stroke in 2005, after which he could no longer play guitar. But he continued to sing, and though he was already living in a nursing home, he returned to performing in 2009. He released two more albums, Last Man Standing in 2015 and Even the Devil Gets the Blues in 2016, recorded in Seattle with Mr. Martin producing and a band that included Mike McCready from Pearl Jam.

Mr. Davis told The Oxford American that he had been married twice, had two children and had helped raise stepchildren. He said he had lost touch with the children. He was scheduled to perform on Oct. 6 at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena.

“I play the blues the way it is,” Mr. Davis said in Blues Back Home. “It tells it all.”

Cedell Davis Offering Delta Blues Tradition

Cedell Davis Offering Delta Blues Tradition

By Stephen Holden - May 28, 1982

 

Although the history of the generation of guitarists of the Mississippi Delta who brought the blues north to Chicago in the 1940's has often been told, many of the musicians who stayed in the South to carry on the blues tradition are only now being discovered by historians and blues aficionados. CeDell Davis, the singer-guitarist who will make his New York debut tonight at Tramps, 125 East 15th Street, is a perfect case in point.

Mr. Davis, who taught himself to play the slide guitar with a table knife after a crippling attack of polio, has been earning a precarious living playing the juke-joint circuit of the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta since the 40's. But he has only recently been discovered by blues anthologists, and even now the only commercially available recording of his playing is in anthologies issued by an obscure German label, L & R.

Yet Mr. Davis, who has lived in Pine Bluff, Ark., since the early 60's, plays with a special verve and style that is attracting increased attention and has begun to appear outside the Delta. His large repertory includes many blues standards by Joe Turner, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and B.B. King as well as original songs, many of them never written down.

Born in Helena, Ark., in 1927, CeDell Davis taught himself to play the guitar at the age of 7, when his family sent him to live with his cousin, the future ''Dr. Ross, the Harmonica Boss.'' At the house where Mr. Davis stayed, the family had rigged up a ''diddey-bow,'' a one-stringed instrument made from a strand of wire attached to the side of a house. Stretched taut by means of a block of wood at one end, it became a one-string slide guitar played with a bottle. From Diddey-Bow to Guitar

Elmore James, Albert King and many other celebrated musicians taught themselves the rudiments of guitar using a diddey-bow. When he went back home, Mr. Davis made a diddey-bow for himself, and from there he graduated to a real guitar.

''We also had windup Graphophones back then,'' Mr. Davis recalled in a recent interview, ''and I learned to play from listening to old records by guys like Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson.''

At the age of 10, Mr. Davis was stricken by polio and hospitalized in Little Rock for more than two years. With his hands and legs partly paralyzed, he found he had to teach himself to play the guitar all over again.

''When I got out of the hospital, I couldn't use my hands as good, so I had to turn the guitar around and play left-handed,'' he said. ''My mother had some knives. I thought I'd feel one of those knives out, and I learned to play with it, bar-style, with the left hand over the top of the neck, not under like people use a slide.'' Plays With Butter Knives

Mr. Davis has played the guitar with butter knives ever since. And his mastery over his disability has helped determine a singularly rhythmic style in which he does an amazing job of keeping a steady rhythm on the bass strings and playing leads on the treble strings all at once.

For 10 years, on and off, in the 50's and 60's, Mr. Davis worked with Robert Nighthawk, an important slide guitarist who influenced Muddy Waters. And he was also a frequent guest on the fabled King Biscuit Time radio show in the South, playing behind Sonny Boy Williamson. In the late 50's, Mr. Davis worked in St. Louis with Bobby Brown.

It was in East St. Louis in 1958 that Mr. Davis suffered a second physical setback when his legs were broken in a bar brawl. Before that, he had been able to walk a mile or two on crutches. Today, his mobility is considerably more restricted.

Mr. Davis returned to Arkansas in 1962 to play with Mr. Nighthawk at a club called The Jack Rabbit, and he has lived in Pine Bluff ever since. But work has not always been easy to find. Leverage, Then a Job

''Bobby and I used to go around to the clubs, and if they were crowded, the owners would say they didn't need no band,'' Mr. Davis recalls. ''So we'd offer to play four or five numbers for free, and the owners would say O.K.

''After we'd gotten everyone out onto the dance floor,'' he continued, ''we'd just stop right in the middle of the scene, take down our stuff and be moving out the door. And the people would say, 'Isn't there gonna be no band?' And then they'd start leaving. Then the owner would stop us and ask what we'd charge to play, and that's how we'd get the job.''

Mr. Davis's name began to circulate outside the Delta only recently. He is in demand as one of the last Delta blues musicians playing in a pure rural style.

CeDell Davis's blues is dance music. He plays shuffles, boogies and stomps with a furious rock beat, hammering out bass lines and playing stinging treble-string leads with his knife on a canary-yellow electric guitar. He is also an utterly original stylist who transforms even familiar blues standards by Jimmy Reed or Joe Turner into down-home stomps. And his vital expressive singing is part Joe Turner shout, part Delta moan.

At Tramps, where he will be performing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the next two weekends, he will be accompanied by a two-man horn section and drums. Show times are 9 and 11:30 P.M. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 8:30 and 11 on Sundays. There is a $6 cover charge. For reservations, call 777-5077.

Cedell Davis in 1982

Combo is Strange Trio
Mattoon, Illinois Gazette - August 30, 1982

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (UPI) - The unorthodox guitar player with a Southern accent in his song and the bespectacled New Yorker with the clarinet at first seemed on opposite ends of the musical spectrum. But, when CeDell Davis and Robert Palmer mixed in a trumpet player from Pocohontas, Ark., the result was a perfect blend of back-country blues. 

Who would have thought Davis, the blues guitarist, and Palmer, the pop music critic for the NeW York Times, could pull it off? "It's an exception to what a lot of other people do," Davis said, "but it works real good. We make it sound right." What sounds right to Davis is the blues. "I play blues and rhythm and blues and a little old-time rock," - he said.

"You know, stuff like Fats Domino used to do. I don't play hard rock. I just stick with the blues." They don't play a lot of blues in New York, so Palmer heads home to the South. The journalist-clarinetist took a vacation recently to return to Arkansas, visit his family and play a few club dates with Davis, whom he met a few years back in a small club in Clarksdale, Miss. Trumpeter Gary Gazaway, from Pocohontas, rounds out the trio. 

Davis' mini-tour included a stop at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis, the city where W.C. Handy, the father of Southern blues music, got the inspiration for his string of standards. Although blues musicians like B.B. King, Albert King and John Lee Hooker have been commercially successful, the notion lingers that genuine blues has been lost. "It had died down in the United States, but it was goin' good in Europe," Davis said. "Now It's picking up back here. I plan to work on it.

Juke Joints: Home of American Music

Cedell Davis Offers Blues

Cedell Davis Dies at 91