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Musician rekindling a special love affair

Music was his life. Now, thanks to a few friends, a bluesman is again doing what he was born to do.

By JON WILSON
Published November 27, 2005

	[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
	Sterling Magee, known as Five Fingers Magee when he played at segregation-era clubs in St. Petersburg and in New York City, plays at the Boca Ciega Center, a nursing home in Gulfport where he lives.

GULFPORT - People called him Five Fingers. Sterling Magee's lightning hand flicked guitar notes so fast and clear that the folks who watched him in St. Petersburg blues clubs swore he must have an extra digit.

As blues stories often do, Magee's contains miles of traveling, some of it hard.

But the latest chapter has become a kind of love story.

Magee, 69, is back, a few miles from where his licks once set clubs afire. He lives at the Boca Ciega Center, recovering from a series of health problems.

Local musicians have embraced him, buying and building equipment so Magee again can belt out old songs like Stagolee.

Kevin Moore, the activities director at the Boca Ciega Center, has become, in essence, Magee's promoter, agent and roadie.

Alice Janisch, who met Magee when her mother was a patient at the center, has become, with Moore, one of the musician's unofficial historians.

During the late 1950s and early '60s, Five Fingers Magee played St. Petersburg's blues venues. It was a limited, segregation-days circuit known to few, stretching from spots like the Robert James Hotel in Methodist Town to the clubs of 22nd Street S.

"I played the Studs Club. It was just a couple of blocks from the Manhattan Casino," he said. "I played the Manhattan a couple of times."

His wizardry earned him a reputation that lingered here long after he left.

"He was a monster guitar player," bandsman Maurice Fontane told the Neighborhood Times in 2002.

One day - he is not sure when - Magee hit the highway for New York City.

Magee backed up entertainers like James Brown. He played at the Apollo Theater. He forged a legend in Harlem, where he became a street musician known as Satan.

"I like to take the bad guy and make him good," Magee said.

These days, Magee sets up in the Boca Ciega Center nursing home courtyard a couple of times a week, playing for residents. On Thursdays, he jams with local blues figures like T.C. Carr, Tracy Percell and David Laycock at the Peninsula Inn and Spa on Beach Boulevard.

On Friday, he and his old street partner Adam Gussow will be featured at the Gulfport Casino. It's a benefit to honor Magee and to raise money to help buy the nursing home a wheelchair-accessible van.

Gussow, 47, played harmonica alongside Magee for 12 years. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is an assistant professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. Gussow's Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir tells much of Magee's story and how the two musicians' lives intersected.

The professor thinks Magee deserves a spot in the Blues Hall of Fame.

"The thing about Sterling which I don't think is understood . . . without question, he's the greatest one-man blues band who ever lived when he was in his prime," Gussow said in a telephone interview last week.

Besides the guitar, Magee played high-hat rigs with cymbals, maracas and tambourines. He used a foot pedal to drive the rhythm.

"His energy back then was just ferocious. The harder he played, the more complex he played," Gussow said.

The two cut three CDs between 1991 and 1996. They have a cameo appearance in a 1988 U2 video from the CD Rattle and Hum. They also show up on a video of the 1993 Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Magee has lived at the Boca Ciega Center for about four years.

For a long time, he played no music there.

Janisch said one day she saw him working the air with his feet and hands.

"I just saw this rhythm coming out of this man. With his feet, his hands, he was hearing his own music. It was almost like I could hear it."

Moore, the activities director, said people told him Magee had been a musician. But it wasn't until he began conducting Internet searches that he realized the extent of his patient's background. Magee eventually opened up about his St. Petersburg days.

Janisch, Moore said, helped get Magee and Carr together.

Playing music again has done wonders, Moore said.

"I would say that's the key to his recovery," he said.

In one sense, Magee has completed a circle in his return to the area where he first began winning fame.

Born in Mount Olive, Miss., not far from U.S. 49, the musician will complete another circle next year.

From Feb. 9-11, Magee and Gussow will appear at the Blues Today: A Living Blues Symposium. It takes place in Oxford, Miss., not far from Magee's hometown.

[Last modified November 27, 2005, 01:18:21]