Sterling Magee, Bluesman known as ‘Satan,’ dies
Sterling Magee, who played a furious, thoroughly original style of blues under the name Mr. Satan, first as a solo act on the streets of Harlem and then as part of the duo Satan and Adam, died on Sept. 6 in Pinellas Park, Florida. He was 84.
His sister Janet Gammons said Magee contracted COVID-19 three months ago and died in a hospice from complications of the disease.
Half bluesman, half street preacher, Magee was a fixture on 125th Street throughout the 1980s, parked one block east of the Apollo Theater, where he drew crowds of curious onlookers and fans. He played electric guitar, sang and stomped out a rhythm with a pair of hi-hat cymbals simultaneously, a feat of musicianship often overshadowed by his otherworldly charisma, bushy Moses-like beard and koan-like sayings.
“We don’t need to rehearse to be people. So why should we have to rehearse to be musicians?” he said in an interview with WNYCTV in 1992, summing up his freewheeling approach to both life and music.
In 1986, Adam Gussow chanced upon a performance by Magee, asked to sit in on harmonica and became his musical partner for many years. “I’d argue he’s the greatest one-man blues band that America has produced,” Gussow, now a professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, said in a phone interview. “Sterling was always trying to push the boundaries. He was a man who was coming into full flower on the street.”
Magee had a brief solo career in the 1960s, and as a guitarist he backed King Curtis, James Brown and Etta James, but he found his greatest fame with Gussow, outside the music industry. They were an unlikely pair: a 50-year-old Black man born and raised in Mississippi and a 28-year-old white, Ivy League-educated writing tutor, jamming before the public at a time when New York was deeply divided along racial lines.
When Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager, was shot and killed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by a white gunman in 1989, Magee told his young associate it would be best to stay away from Harlem until tensions cooled, Gussow remembered.
But Magee never dwelt on their racial differences. “When we get together, I’m Mr. Satan and he’s Mr. Gussow,” he told The New York Times in 2019, upon the release of the Netflix documentary “Satan and Adam.” “I want to put the message out that Mr. Satan is in love with this person, and that I don’t give a damn about all that stuff.”
Satan and Adam honed their act as street musicians for four years. Then, at Gussow’s urging, they embarked on a more professional career.
They played a celebrated show at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1991; released a trio of raw-sounding albums, beginning with “Harlem Blues” that same year; and toured widely. They appeared briefly in U2’s 1988 tour documentary, “Rattle and Hum.” They were the subjects of both the Netflix documentary and a 1998 memoir by Gussow, “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.”
V. Scott Balcerek, who directed the film, first encountered the duo in 1992 at a club in Pittsburgh. “I was blown away by the sound these two people could make,” he said.
Sterling Magee was born on May 20, 1936, in Mount Olive, Mississippi, to Guy and Lena (Rowe) Magee. His mother, a Baptist, scolded him for playing secular music on the piano, and he developed a lifelong dislike of organized religion, which he viewed as hypocritical.
Parts of Magee’s career and personal life remain a mystery. He joined the Air Force after high school, and upon his discharge moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where his family had relocated. He played local clubs billed as Five Fingers Magee, he told Gussow, because of his virtuosic technique.
“He prided himself on having invented a new way of playing,” Gussow said. “He didn’t bend strings like B.B. or Albert King. He moved chord forms back and forth really quick, and used drone strings. He could keep the chord thing going and drill high treble stuff for emphasis.”
In the 1960s, Magee recorded some singles for Tangerine Records. He maintained that he never received promotion because Ray Charles, the founder of the label, didn’t like other artists to outshine him. He became disillusioned by the music industry as a result.
He bounced around during the 1970s, living at times in New York, Mississippi and Florida. His wife, Betty, died of cancer, an experience that traumatized him. In 1979, he re-emerged as Satan. He gave various explanations over the years for his identity change.
“It wasn’t a thing I decided,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. “A transition came over me.”