Roosevelt Sykes
Roosevelt Sykes (January 31, 1906 – July 17, 1983) was an American blues musician, also known as “the Honeydripper.”
At age 15, he went on the road playing piano in a barrelhouse style of blues. Like many bluesmen of his time, he traveled around playing to all-male audiences in sawmill, turpentine and levee camps along the Mississippi River, sometimes in a duo with Big Joe Williams, gathering a repertoire of raw, sexually explicit material. In 1925 Sykes met Leothus “Lee” Green, a piano player in a West Helena theater playing a mix of blues, ragtime, waltz, and jazz to accompany silent movies. They worked the Louisiana and Mississippi work camp and roadhouse circuit together, with the older man acting as mentor and protector to Sykes. “I just been pickin’ a little cotton,” Sykes would say from the stage, “and pickin’ a little piano.”The more experienced Green taught him the style, characterized by separate bass and treble rhythms, that would become the basis for “44 Blues.” Sykes’ wanderings eventually brought him back to St. Louis, Missouri, where he met St. Louis Jimmy Oden,[7] the writer of the blues standard “Goin’ Down Slow.”