STERLING MAGEE - KEEP ON

Born in Mississippi, Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee (b. May 20, 1936; Mt. Olive, MS) was raised in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he came of age dabbling as a piano player in local churches and suffering his parents' ire when he drifted into the blues. As a young man he worked local blues clubs under the monicker "Five Fingers Magee" and was billed as "the fastest guitar player in the world." After a stint in Germany as a U.S. Army paratrooper in the 1950s, Magee was demobilized in New York and ended up settling in Harlem. A sometime-songwriter for Jesse Stone, Magee recorded several near-hits on Ray Charles's Tangerine label in the early 1960s, including "Get in My Arms Little Girl." His proficiency on guitar earned him gigs with a number of rhythm-and-blues performers, including James Brown, King Curtis, Big Maybelle, Joey Dee and the Starlighters, and a transvestite duo known as The Illusions That Create Confusion. In the mid 1970s he played sessions with Paul Winley and the Harlem Underground, a loose-knit unit that included George Benson.
In the late 1970s, after the death of his wife, Magee gave up guitar, roamed widely through Mississippi, Florida, and Puerto Rico, and returned to Harlem reborn, refusing to be identified by his birth-name and demanding that his associates call him Satan. His longtime friend and business manager, Harlem producer and record-store owner Bobby Robinson (of the Fire and Fury R&B labels), rented him an apartment and put a guitar in his hands. Soon Magee was strolling the streets, playing for what he later referred to as his "wino buddies." By 1983 he had added a hi-hat cymbal to his mix and begun to perform as a one-man band on 125th Street in front of the New York Telephone Company office, sometimes accompanied by drummer Pancho Morales and other musicians.
It was around this time that Adam Gussow, a Princeton graduate and English M.A. student at Columbia University, first saw Magee and his trio performing on the corner of 114th Street and Broadway. (Gussow relates the story in his 1998 blues memoir, Mister Satan's Apprentice.) In October 1986, Gussow encountered Magee again, purely by chance, this time at Magee's regular stretch of sidewalk near the Apollo Theater. Gussow, a semi-seasoned street performer by this point, sat in. The two musicians—one older, African American, and southern-born; the other younger, white, Ivy-educated, a New York suburbanite—hit it off, and the duo Satan and Adam was born.
What began as a streetside encounter ended up blossoming into a twelve-year success story. The duo's initial notoriety accrued in the summer of 1987, when the members of U2 wandered by Magee and Gussow with a video crew in tow, capturing the Harlem duo at work. Thirty-nine seconds of Magee's original composition, "Freedom for My People" were ultimately included in the Rattle and Hum documentary.
After a charmed rise, the duo's fortunes took a disastrous downward turn in 1998 when Magee, who had recently relocated from Harlem to Brookneal, Virginia, had a nervous breakdown and, after briefly resurfacing, dropped completely out of sight. Satan and Adam effectively dissolved as a partnership.
After a long silence, Magee has recently come back into view. He is currently living at the Boca Ciega adult care facility in Gulfport, Florida, a small community next to St. Petersburg. His guitar skills, which vanished with his breakdown, have partially reconstituted themselves with the help of harpist T. C. Carr and other Tampa-area blues performers who have dedicated themselves to furthering his comeback. In late 2005 and early 2006, Satan and Adam played several comeback gigs in Gulfport and Oxford, Mississippi, where Gussow is currently an associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
CREDIT INFO: LAST.FM

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• STERLING
• MAGEE
• KEEP
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[jelboysvw]

Remeber this tune well!