Biography
Born Richard Henry, the North Carolina country blues musician carved out a distinctive late-career role as a festival and nightclub performer who delighted audiences during an era when numerous veteran blues figures were disappearing. Raised along the North Carolina shoreline during the 1920s and 1930s, when blues players still performed on sidewalks and juke joints pulsed with nightly music, he absorbed early inspiration from South Carolina bluesman Fred Miller. In the classic country-blues mentor-protégé pattern, Henry accompanied Miller to events where they earned small change for their songs; before long the younger man assumed the lead vocals because Miller’s singing stood in sharp contrast to his own strong guitar work. After Miller relocated to New York, Big Boy Henry made repeated trips north to sustain the partnership, which in turn brought introductions to other Piedmont stylists including the whooping harmonica player Sonny Terry and his partner Brownie McGhee. In 1951 the opportunity arose to record with that celebrated pair—an occasion likened to enlisting Rembrandt and Cézanne for interior decoration—yet the resulting sides remained unissued for decades in a pattern all too common in American blues recording history. Discouraged, Henry returned to his coastal home in New Bern and set the guitar aside.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he labored on fishing and oystering crews, operated a grocery store, and occasionally preached in neighborhood churches, echoing the sentiment Son House voiced in “Preachin’ Blues”: “I’m gonna become a Baptist preacher/And then I won’t have to work.” In 1971 he resettled in his original family house in Beaufort, where a circle of younger local musicians soon discovered him; their encouragement proved sufficient to draw him back to performance. Although arthritis later limited his dexterity, he continued to fashion inventive single-string lines and to manipulate rhythms and bar structures with the same liberty Lightnin’ Hopkins displayed. Younger North Carolina players such as harmonica virtuoso Chris Turner and guitarist Billy Hobbs found it rewarding to keep pace with the older musician, whose sets unfailingly generated the intense atmosphere known as “deep blues feeling.” His singing retained its force in later years as he fashioned fresh interpretations of standards and composed original pieces that often addressed contemporary issues. The powerful song “Mr. President,” an indignant protest against the social-welfare reductions of the Reagan years, earned him a W.C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation; in 1995 he also received the North Carolina Arts Council Folk Heritage Award.
Henry’s musical engagement extended past the stage. He worked with elder community members to preserve the coastal work-song tradition practiced by African-American menhaden-boat fishermen, forming the retired crew members into the singing ensemble known as the Menhaden Chantey Men.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he labored on fishing and oystering crews, operated a grocery store, and occasionally preached in neighborhood churches, echoing the sentiment Son House voiced in “Preachin’ Blues”: “I’m gonna become a Baptist preacher/And then I won’t have to work.” In 1971 he resettled in his original family house in Beaufort, where a circle of younger local musicians soon discovered him; their encouragement proved sufficient to draw him back to performance. Although arthritis later limited his dexterity, he continued to fashion inventive single-string lines and to manipulate rhythms and bar structures with the same liberty Lightnin’ Hopkins displayed. Younger North Carolina players such as harmonica virtuoso Chris Turner and guitarist Billy Hobbs found it rewarding to keep pace with the older musician, whose sets unfailingly generated the intense atmosphere known as “deep blues feeling.” His singing retained its force in later years as he fashioned fresh interpretations of standards and composed original pieces that often addressed contemporary issues. The powerful song “Mr. President,” an indignant protest against the social-welfare reductions of the Reagan years, earned him a W.C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation; in 1995 he also received the North Carolina Arts Council Folk Heritage Award.
Henry’s musical engagement extended past the stage. He worked with elder community members to preserve the coastal work-song tradition practiced by African-American menhaden-boat fishermen, forming the retired crew members into the singing ensemble known as the Menhaden Chantey Men.
Albums