From Mother Africa with love

The blues comes from the Deep South. It came out of the cotton fields, and the terrible working and living conditions endured for generations by African-Americans, around the end of the 19th century.

By BARRY DAVIS
Guitarist-vocalist Corey Harris will bring the mud of the Mississippi Delta to Jerusalem, as part of the Sacred Music Festival (photo credit: Courtesy)
Guitarist-vocalist Corey Harris will bring the mud of the Mississippi Delta to Jerusalem, as part of the Sacred Music Festival
(photo credit: Courtesy)
One might not naturally associate the blues with holy music, but it is a fair bet that the audience at Corey Harris’s concert, as part of this year’s Sacred Music Festival in Jerusalem, will get something spiritual out of the gig, in addition to musical entertainment per se.
Harris, who will perform at David’s Tower on September 3 (6 p.m.), feeds off the umbilical cord of the genre. The guitarist-vocalist is doing his bit to keep the music alive and kicking. He started out in the mid-1990s as an upcoming standard-bearer for acoustic guitar- based blues, and features prominently in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 miniseries for PBS television The Blues.
“When I learned to play the blues, I knew I was connecting with my ancestors and my history,” Harris remarks in the documentary.
“To know yourself you have to know the past.”
Harris is deeply rooted in the music and immerses himself in its lore.
“My great-grandmother used to call it ‘knocking-at-the-back-door music,’ he continues. “Other people call it the devil’s music. You listen to it and you feel the mud and blood of the Mississippi Delta.”
That comes across in spades in Harris’s live and recorded output.
The blues comes from the Deep South. It came out of the cotton fields, and the terrible working and living conditions endured for generations by African-Americans, around the end of the 19th century.
The electric version of the music, as principally presented on electric guitar, emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s, through Texas- born T-Bone Walker, and Mississippi-born John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and later made its way north, principally to Chicago, but also to Detroit and California.
While Harris plays both varieties, and even dips into reggae, he says he feels a stronger bond with the more organic breed.
“It depends on who is playing the music. If I had to choose between [electric blues player] Stevie Ray Vaughan and [iconic Mississippi-born acoustic blues artist] Albert King, then I’m going to go with Albert King every day. I like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but it’s moving me in a very deep place in the same way. It is more something that I like, and it entertains me and I appreciate the musicianship, but it doesn’t move me the same way. I can also say that it is acoustic blues that got me started loving the blues. I heard more acoustic blues than electric blues when I came into it.”
Playing the guitar and making his fingers do the work, without the support of inbuilt sound augmentation, for Harris is where the music he loves so much comes from, in terms of its sonic, cultural and spiritual resonance.
“I have always held on to the acoustic blues sound, and that is my inspiration, and even though I play electric guitar I know it started with the roots, in the 20th century, with acoustic blues.”
It was the vibe, as much as anything else, that first grabbed the young Harris and drew him inexorably into the genre of music that eventually became his career and way of life.
“I was at a house party with my folks, and everyone in my family comes from Texas and Louisiana and places like that. They put on [a record by] Z.Z. Hill – Down Home Blues – and I just remember the song and it just affected me. I liked the way he played guitar. I also liked the way he looked on the cover of the record. He looked self-assured and he wasn’t putting on an act. He was himself. That also had an impact on me.”
Harris says he grew up with what he simply calls music.
“I grew up with the whole spectrum of black music. We didn’t operate like ‘we’re going to listen to blues now’ or ‘now we’re going to put on a jazz record,’ or ‘now this is funk.’ We just put on a record. To me it was black music because I felt it was an expression of black life coming from the South. That’s how I came up listening to what we might call the genre of black music.”
Over the years, Harris spread his black music net far and wide.
“Now, as a musician, I am not bound in my mind by what box I should be playing in. I just try to be true to the tradition – lyrically and musically – and to be respectful. And to tell the story. That’s what it’s really about – telling the truth.”
In addition to digging into the history of the cradle of the blues, the Deep South, Harris made it his business to take another step back into the roots of the music, by visiting Africa.
He spent some time in Cameroon, initially to study local languages, including pidgin English.
“I have always been interested in languages, so I was learning Cameroonian pidgin English and Nigerian pidgin English, and learning the connections,” he says.
Naturally, music also came into the educational equation.
“I was also influenced by the music because music is everywhere in Africa. First I was listening to Cameroonian music and Nigerian music, and then I started getting into Malian music and music from other places. But it all started from me looking for my roots, and looking for black people’s roots in general.”
That initial foray to Mother Africa spawned further visits, and Harris began to mix it with some of the leading local musicians, including stellar Mali bluesman Ali Farka Toure. Last year he also published a book on the African master called Jahtigui: The Life & Music of Ali Farka Toure.
Harris returns to the theme of digging deep in order to be able to put out something honest and personal to the public.
“In America, we all live together in a society, but we have to realize we all have different histories,” he posits. “That was an outgrowth of me going to Africa. For me, that was a journey of personal discovery, trying to uncover and wipe away all the falsities that I had been told at public school, and things that popular culture – on TV and the rest of the media – tells you about your origins and about Africa.”
Harris is still traveling that road, immersing himself ever more deeply into the music and all the baggage that comes with it. His Tower of David audience will, no doubt, get a strong sense of that as he plays material from his last two releases – True Blues and Live from Turtle Island. It should be a singular experience for one and all. • For more information about the Sacred Music Festival: www.jerusalemseason.
com