Henry Franklin (Richard) Justice, b. April 2, 1903 ( 1906?) in Logan County, WV, d. September 12, 1962 in Man, Logan County, WV (buried at Rum Creek Hollow in Yolyn, Logan County, WV), blues and folk musician, who hailed from West Virginia.
Born Richard Justice, he recorded ten songs for Brunswick Records in Chicago in 1929. Unlike many contemporary white musicians, he was heavily influenced by black musicians, particularly Luke Jordan who recorded in 1927 and 1929 for Victor Records. Justice's "Cocaine" is a verse-for-verse cover of the Jordan track of the same name recorded two years earlier. The song "Brownskin Blues" is also stylistically akin to much of Jordan's work but stands on its own as a Justice original. As Jordan hailed from around Lynchburg, Virginia it is perhaps worth speculating that the two may have been associates. Justice is also musically related to Frank Hutchison (with whom he played music and worked as a coal miner in Logan County, West Virginia), Bayless Rose and The Williamson Brothers.
His recording of the traditional ballad "Henry Lee" was the opening track of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. Justice also recorded four sides ("Guian Valley Waltz" and "Poor Girl's Waltz", "Muskrat Rag" and "Poca River Blues") with the fiddler Reese Jarvis.
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By John Bush
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 sides were compiled on the Document collection Old-Time Music from West Virginia (1927-1929).