Downhome Sophisticate

"To me, the blues is the blueprint," says maverick guitarist and singer/songwriter Corey Harris. "You can go from that blueprint and build whatever house you want. That's what we as black Americans gave to the world: the concept of blues. But at the same time, I'm of a different generation. I didn't ever have to go to the back of a bus. If I was out on the road, I wouldn't have to camp in my car because they wouldn't let black people in the hotel. So I'm trying to represent what my tradition is, and then represent my individual self in the contemporary moment."

Harris's life and music embrace the black experience in all its dimensions. He burst onto the scene in 1995 with his debut recording Between Midnight and Day, an acclaimed exploration of acoustic, rural blues styles. At the time, few really grasped the scope and range of Harris's musical persona. He had solid blues credentials. After street-busking and taking small gigs wherever he could drive to from his home outside New Orleans, it quickly became clear that pigeonholing Harris as a blues musician was never going to work. Take for instance the fact that he had actually polished up his blues playing while living in Cameroon, studying Pidgin English on a Watson Fellowship. What's more, he'd grown up listening to gospel, funk, Motown, jazz, reggae and R&B, and by the time he moved to New Orleans, he was well on his way to becoming a connoisseur of African music.

"I was listening to reggae before I was listening to blues," says Harris, "and I was listening to Wes Montgomery before I was listening to Muddy Waters." Harris revealed more and more of himself on subsequent albums, Fish Ain't Bitin' (1997) and Greens from the Garden (1999). But with the release of his Rounder Records debut Downhome Sophisticate, his bold eclecticism reaches full flower. "This is a turning point," he says. "I see the record as a coalescing of all the things I was trying to do in the previous records. I want to reach people in other countries. I want to say something that is about my experience as a black person who has been in other places where black people live and observed how they do their thing. But I want to make it so that other people can feel it and understand it and say, 'Oh, this relates to me too.'"

Harris's one-of-a-kind story begins in Denver, Colorado in 1969. His mother came from northeast Texas with a strong southern perspective. His step-father-also a southerner-had musical relatives active in the gospel, jazz, and R&B scenes of the day. Young Corey made an early stand with his toy guitar, his penchant for banging on pots and pans and making up songs on the spot. He started music lessons at five, learning to read music while playing trumpet. At 12, he abandoned the trumpet and turned in earnest to the guitar.

At Bates College in Maine, Harris became absorbed in exploring his heritage, which led to Africa, and to anthropology. He honed in on language as key to understanding the black experience. "I was interested in Pidgin," he says, "because if you look at the history of Pidgin, it's the history of all black people who had to deal with the Middle Passage, in that we had to come up with new ways of talking and expression, to be able to speak about things in the presence of those who had power over us, but also to be able to communicate with people from different parts of the continent."

With college French under his belt, Harris ventured twice to Cameroon. The experience gave him a new perspective on language and history, but also on the music he'd grown up with. "It was just how rhythmic the music there is," says Harris. "I always knew that the basis of black music is rhythm, but it was a great demonstration to see all the different ways rhythm comes out." Harris's approach to guitar playing was never the same after Cameroon. "I can't feel anything without there being a beat," he says. "I've noticed that the best musicians are those who played drums or something rhythmic first. Henry Butler is phenomenal. He played drums in church before he ever touched a keyboard. Stevie Wonder, same thing."
Once he got back to the States, and began recording, Harris viewed each successive album as a new opportunity to pull together more strands of his rich experience. With Downhome Sophisticate, Harris set his highest sights to date. He wanted to write most of the songs himself, to collaborate with other musicians, to add a strong female element to the songs by using female voices alongside his own, to tell stories about his life and take on big themes in the lyrics, all the while creating a sonic portrait of the many places he's been in his life.

Harris's powerful rhythmic approach comes through with ballsy bravado in an electric version of "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning," a reprise from his debut acoustic album, and on his own roadhouse blues number, "Money on My Mind." In the album's opening tracks he reveals an impressive mastery of black American vocal idioms as well, from the easy, scratchy wail of a New Orleans shouter on the funky "Frankie Doris," to the deep, sure howl of a Chicago bluesman on "Don't Let the Devil Ride."

Then things start to get really interesting. Some of this album's core songs were inspired by Harris's recent trips to Mali, one of the richest countries in West Africa from a cultural perspective. Harris turns an open-tuning riff he picked up in Ali Farka Toure's home town, Niafounke, into a trancey, psychedelic jaunt on the song "Fire." On "Capitaine" he picks up his acoustic and plays a cycling, squirrelly instrumental duo with his longtime accompanist Jamal Millner. The song mirrors the experience of a fish, the capitaine, swimming in the Niger River. "To me, it was a very emotional experience the first time I saw the Niger," says Harris. "Just knowing the importance of that river in African history, and then just knowing in general the importance of rivers to music all over the world, and especially to black music, how rivers had so much to do with jazz and blues."

"Santoro" takes its name from the Bamako, Mali, restaurant where Harris overheard the maniacally cycling guitar riff that inspired the song's music. Edging close to the soft falsetto of Hendrix in his vocal, Harris delivers a tough lyric about police brutality. He says, "'Santoro' is about how when you're in law enforcement and you're always provoking reactions from people, then you can't be surprised if you come upon somebody who's a little nutty or violent and will strike back at you."

"Sister Rose" reaches back to Harris's Cameroon experience. Over a rollicking groove that splits the difference between New Orleans second-line and Cameroonian makossa, Harris offers loving advice to a younger sister. And on "Money Eye," another song rich with the elusive rhythms of African pop, he pokes fun at the "friend" who forever borrows money, but never pays you back.

Downhome Sophisticate offers a remarkable array of textures, rhythms, ideas, and moods, all of them rich with associations, while at the same time, highly personal. Harris's all-inclusive approach to songcraft is nothing less than a way of life. "A lot of the walls that we put up between one another-we're conditioned to do that," he says. "It's in the media and in our education for us to look at all the differences and then conclude that there are these huge walls between us. But I really feel that as humans we all have one soul. We got one heart. We got one blood. As the world's getting smaller, we've really got to learn about each other, and part of that is knowing where you're coming from. So I think that by trying to figure out what's inside of me musically and the heritage that I've got, that I can better live with others." From the blueprint of the blues, Harris has made a world big enough for his own huge imagination, and also for all of us. - Banning Eyre, 2/2002