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Michael Stamper, a.k.a. Nick Stump, performs in Lexington, Kentucky. (Photo via Nick Stump Band Facebook page)
In 1987 the Metropolitan Blues All Stars were headliners for an Appalachian cultural gala in Chicago. It was a celebration of Appalshop that featured Roadside Theater, Fiddle King of the South Marion Sumner, renowned banjo player Lee Sexton, and screenings of Appalshop films. Met Blues was fronted by three guys who’d led their own bands earlier. (Hence All Stars.) Two of them, Rodney Hatfield and Mike Stamper, grew up in different East Kentucky coal towns and both came to the blues listening to the ubiquitous WLAC Nashville. (The band’s third vocalist, Frank Schaap, grew up in the Hamptons with a swimming pool. Played folk music.) Because it took a certain kind of boldness or tunnel vision to bring a white blues band from Kentucky to Chicago, the event’s producer kept urging Mike, stage name Nick Stump, to share what it was like coming up hardscrabble in the coalfields during the War on Poverty. He opened the show saying that he grew up poor in Appalachia, and then one day a kind VISTA volunteer showed up in town with an electric guitar. And that he beat the guy up, took his guitar, and he’d been playing ever since.