Cape has rich but unknown music history

How many of you local music afficianados have heard of Jess Stacy? Does the name Peg Meyer ring a bell? If not, don't worry, you're not alone. However, it's hard to deny the influence, impact and greatness of the original Melody Kings.

Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University, certainly knows of Stacy and Meyer, and co-authored "Back Woods Jazz in the Twenties" with Meyer, a short history of the area's jazz and swing beginnings.

"I asked Peg if he would be willing to sit for an interview, and he said he had a couple of manuscripts that he had been working on about his musical experience," said Nickell. "And so he gave it to me and it was a forerunner of the book. It was fairly incomplete and in rough shape, so what we did was every Wednesday afternoon for several weeks I would take my tape recorder and sit with him."

"Back Woods Jazz," now 18-years young, is Nickell's interview with Meyer combined with Meyer's manuscripts. Meyer lead a pretty interesting life, playing jazz in the Melody Kings with Stacy for most of the 1920s, teaching some 5,000 students in the area how to play instuments and owning the town's first music store, which he sold to the Shivelbine family and worked at as a small instrument repairman until his death in 1995.

Stacy's life wasn't a very bland one, either.

Born in a boxcar in Birds Point, Mo., Stacy, known as one of the greatest jazz-swing pianists of all-time, and Meyer played on riverboats constantly with the Melody Kings. In the 1920s he moved to Chicago, where he made a name for himself playing with Paul Mares. Later he worked with Benny Goodman and performed with him at Carnegie Hall in 1938. The Carnegie Hall performance gained attention due to an unplanned, yet widely praised, solo by Stacy during "Sing Sing Sing." Stacy also spent time with the bands of Bob Crosby, Tommy Dorsey and Eddie Condon. He put together a big band of his own and recorded with Lee Wiley to whom he was married for a time. By the late 1940s he moved to California, but his career declined to mostly club work and he eventually retired from public playing.

"Many people who have studied jazz say that solo Stacy played at Carnegie Hall is the most significant two minutes in jazz history," said Nickell. "But he became a club piano player although he was a person of great talent. He was just very under-used and not very assertive. But he and Peg were lifelong friends and Peg always admired him."

You can find more information, and "Back Woods Jazz in the Twenties," at the Center for Regional History.