EDWARD CARY STICKNEY
Edward Cary Stickney died peacefully at home on April 7 of cancer. He was 66 years old.
Cary was expansive, loving, and generous. There was always room for one more person at the table, time for one more tune to be played, another question asked, another book from the shelf, another dish at the feast. Indeed, his appetite for both food and life was legendary among his friends and family.
He and his wife Susan loved to travel and they spent many a fine hour walking great distances through foreign cities, discovering art, food, places of beauty both secret and well-known. His capacious, precise memory of things he read and saw allowed him to connect books and thoughts to his life and the lives of others. This capacity meant that conversations with him deepened and broadened whatever topic was at hand. We all came away from those conversations with a context for our own thought that inspired and delighted.
He found his life’s work when, having dropped out of high school, he discovered St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Maryland. He returned to the college, this time in Santa Fe, in 1980 as a teacher. He was 26 years old when he began his work and he never looked back or even sideways until cancer forced him into early retirement in 2020. He loved every part of the St. John’s program, and he believed fiercely in the power of a liberal arts education. He was always willing to take extra time and trouble in order to give his students the best possible access to the books and ideas he hoped might be their true teachers. His students and colleagues will doubtless remember his big laugh, but they will also remember how very seriously he took the project of education and how passionately he felt about maintaining its integrity.
Music was another deeply animating force of his life. He learned his first songs on the guitar from his father, Stonewall, when he was a boy. When he was 14 years old, at boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, he listened to LP cuts of his blues heroes over and over again, picking out the tunes. Over the years he picked up the banjo, the harmonica, the mandolin, the fiddle, the ukulele, and would happily attempt to play any instrument that wasn’t in someone else’s hands. The music he loved best expressed the joys and pains of a particular group of people in a particular time. The Blues was his first love, but over the course of his life he was drawn to – and worked to play – old-timey Appalachian music, traditional Irish music, medieval European music, shape note singing, music from the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, Cape Breton fiddle music, Gospel Music, Cajun music, and many others. He had a deep and abiding love of singing. One of his favorite moments of the year in Santa Fe was walking among the farolitos, singing carols with his family. But any moment, whether it was a formal occasion or simply a glimpse of a bird or the rising moon, was liable to remind him of a song. He knew the words and melodies to more songs than anyone who loved him was able to keep track of.
Santa Fe is rich in people who want to play live music, and it was one of Cary’s greatest joys to play and sing with friends. He liked to play at the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning, he played with friends at Las Golondrinas, and was an active member of the Santa Fe FolkMADS group. He helped to bring some of the musical vitality of Santa Fe to the St. John’s College campus in the form of Tunes at Noon, an informal outdoor session that attracted both students and musicians from town.
He is survived by his wife, Susan, his daughters Sarah and Amelia, and his son-in-law Jake. Memorial contributions can be made in his name to St. John’s College, either by contacting the Donations Office or online at: sjc.edu/giving or to Santa Fe Friends of Traditional Music, a nonprofit organization.
A memorial service will be announced at a later date.