Dick Justice

A native of West Virginia, folksinger Dick Justice blended both blues and folk patterns on his recordings of the late '20s. Born Richard Justice in 1906, he played with many black musicians as a youth and listened to blues records as well. Justice recorded a total of ten sides for Brunswick during 1929 (some as a duo with Reese Jarvis), including a version of "Henry Lee" that later gained inclusion on Harry Smith's 1952 folksong collection Anthology of American Folk Music. Little is known about the rest of Justice's life, though he often worked in the coal mines. Many of his s...