“Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.” ~ Simon Raven
cold snap
It is Ash Wednesday. It is also the day Kentucky lost one of her best and brightest sons. Nick Stump, born Michael Stamper, walked on to the other side this morning and left a passel full of heartbroken hillbillies. I talked to Nick for the last time in December. We connected, or were trying to anyway, so he could do an interview for my oral history project on gig economy workers in the Covid era. That blasted system I was using to record the interviews wouldn’t connect us. It had him stymied, and both of us together couldn’t get him connected. Instead, we chatted on the phone for a while then decided to give it a week and try a different route. He got sick that week and never got better and the world missed out on hearing in his words, in his voice, about his career in music. And what a career – what a life – it was. I can say it no better than the brilliant obit written by his son and daughter below. What I can add is he left an indelible mark on my life more than 30 years ago. Somewhere in this house is a crappy 4-track recording of Stump playing brilliant guitar on a song Ann Nipper Mayabb and I wrote way, way back when he and I were living in the same apartment building. One of the last things he said to me was, “You’ve always been really good to me.” It left me speechless. And here I thought he was the one who’d always been good to me…because he was always good to me and so many others. I am going to miss – and wonder about – the conversations we didn’t have, but I will always be grateful for the ones we did. What a ride. Lexington just won’t be the same without him.
Stump
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