One of this area’s all-time greatest singing voices went silent on November 14. Reese McHenry died that morning, felled by metastatic sarcoma after years of suffering through multiple health struggles. She was just 51 years old.
Officially, McHenry was survived by her mother, a brother, and her husband of 18 years, Justin. But her family was much, much broader than that. In a way, you could list the entire local music community as survivors. Quite apart from the magic she conjured onstage going back to her days fronting Dirty Little Heaters, McHenry was one of the most universally beloved figures on the scene.
“She was also a nanny who raised a lot of people’s children, pets, homes, and broken hearts,” says her longtime friend and fellow musician Mimi McLaughlin, from Magnolia Collective. “It’s hard to memorialize such a big person. She had a gigantic heart, and it was battery-operated.”
McHenry did indeed have a pacemaker, installed to steady her heart after a series of strokes. She beat the sarcoma once, but it came roaring back with a vengeance this past summer and was too much to overcome a second time. Still, she fought it to the end, maintaining grace and good humor with a series of posts.
“I think I’m doing well to the point I may be able to break out the acoustic and play very gently,” she wrote on October 18, her final post.
Her final public performances were the weekend of August 2-3 at The Cave in Chapel Hill, at which point the cancer was already taking a toll. Her husband Justin said she could barely walk to the car afterward, but you’d never have known it from her performances. Her husband Justin likened it to the finale of the baseball movie The Natural.
“As most people who know Reese know, she’s a bad mother fucker,” says Justin. “She had a biopsy wound bleeding through the dressing the second night. But in true Roy Hobbs fashion, she still played and still rocked. She’s tough. She did it, somehow.”
Routinely compared to Janis Joplin for her powerful, bluesy yowl, McHenry was a genuine force of nature—a phrase that has come up repeatedly in the wake of her death. McHenry played with a string of bands, her fellow garage-rockers Spider Bags among them, and never met a crowd she couldn’t move.
Her friend Virginia Maxine Sloop recalled seeing McHenry at the North Carolina State Fair once in circumstances where most musicians would have been politely ignored.
“At least half the folks were there only because of the chairs to sit in, gnawing on turkey legs,” Sloop says. “Curse of the daytime stage. But as soon as she started singing, they sat up and paid attention. She won over a crowd of random fair-goers.”
But the memories that resonate most for her friends came offstage.
Artist/musician Caitlin Cary remembers McHenry taking her on a shopping trip once to buy a dress for an upcoming event. She was moved by how seriously McHenry took a mission that Cary herself had mixed feelings about.
“It’s hard to explain why that mattered so much,” says Cary. “It has to do with how hard it can be to put true value on your art, your life, the actions of the day. Reese made it really matter. I suspect she did the same thing for a lot of people, particularly women who needed to have their whatever taken seriously.”
Sloop remembers McHenry as one of the most genuine, real people she’s ever known— without being a pushover.
“As kind as she was, she was not overly sweet,” Sloop says. “Still a smartass. And God, when she was onstage, you could not look away. For all of us, you loved her and wanted her to like you. And when she did, you were excited about it. A force of nature. How lucky that we got to see and know her. It seems unreal. But it was.”
Plans for memorial services are still in the works. In the meantime, countless remembrances and tributes have been appearing on social media. A previously scheduled benefit for the McHenry family’s medical bills and expenses went on at Local 506 on November 15, with Pipe, Spider Bags, Lud, and Hot Brains playing for a gathering of the faithful.
Before long, there will also be a McHenry mural appearing somewhere in the Triangle, painted by Scott Nurkin of the North Carolina Musicians Murals project.
“Reese would be simultaneously embarrassed and totally encouraged to hear everyone call her ‘a force of nature,’” says Nurkin, drummer in Dynamite Brothers and Birds of Avalon. “Because it’s such a truth. She was a musician you instantly bonded with because she was better than good. The woman could wail. We discussed her mural at length before her death and it’s going to be one of the most fun, inspiring things I’ve ever done.”
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