Jess Stacy was a ready dance pianist in his teens at Cape Girardeau, Mo. “Jess was always a serious and fundamentally sound musician,” attested R.F. "Peg" Meyer, bandleader. “His great interest in life was always the piano, and he pursued it in a quiet and hard-working manner. He was born with a natural talent and fingers that could span thirteen piano keys (five notes over an octave) and developed a determination that he would not just play the piano, he would excel at it. After school when the rest of us would play pool or seek other amusement, he would hurry home, climb on the piano stool, and practice arpeggios by the hour.”

Stacy’s fingers on piano were “trained down to steel… bringing out both ends of an octave at once through any din,” reviewed Otis Ferguson in 1937. The jazz critic heard Stacy’s piano “as both an orchestra in miniature and a linking force among its separate parts, tying the chorded beat of the rhythm section into the melodic line, providing a sort of common base as between brass and reeds, filling out the chords of each.”