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 Bluesman Corey Harris December 1999 / January 2000 By Natasha Nargis
Tell us about Greens From The Garden. It's different from your first two releases, which were a lot more traditional. Well, this CD is like the title implies, a bunch of different things kind of cooked together. There are different influences that are in my music that I wanted to bring out more explicitly, and show people the type of thing I'm into. So this record has bits of music inspired directly by my experiences in Africa. It has music from my experiences in New Orleans. And then just music from my heritage, from blues and early forms of black music, like ragtime and whatnot. You grew up in Denver. How did you wind up in New Orleans? I wound up living in Louisiana because I had a teaching job. I taught public school for a year. I taught English and French. Did you write the French songs on Greens? I wrote one of them, "Pas Parlez." When you first went to Louisiana, you were teaching, and then you spent more and more time playing music. It seems you evolved to recording three CDs in a fairly short period of time. I guess I did. I played on the street for awhile. I also traveled around, mostly in the eastern United States, playing. That's when I began to make a move toward recording my first CD. Tell me about some of the cuts on it. "Roots Woman"? I wrote that song as a tribute to my wife. To make a long story short, we were living in New Orleans for a while. Well, actually, I lived there before we met, and then we met up in Virginia, and then we moved around a bit, and we ended up living in New Orleans again. But basically the song is about how someone that you love will make you change cities and states, move somewhere else. "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning"? That's an old gospel tune. Did you sing gospel growing up? Well, I went to church, and we listened to gospel music, and I had gospel musicians in my family, so it affected me. "I'm A Rattlesnake Daddy"? That's a Blind Boy Fuller tune, and I picked it up from John Jackson, who is a native Virginian. He's about 84. He's got a record on Alligator called Front Porch Blues that just came out. It's a great record of old blues and old ragtime type of things, which he's known for. In fact, the music of Virginia is known as Piedmont blues, or Piedmont rag, which he's really known for. You also did a version of "Frankie And Johnnie," which I thought was a gas. That's a song I played on the street for a long time. I learned it off other street musicians. It's just a song I like. I guess one thing I really like is that it's a really old song. The lyrics are from the late-19th century, and I guess it comes out of the Tin Pan Alley era... I think it's a public domain tune. I just went back to some earlier versions and put in some of the words from those. There are a lot of different written versions of that tune. "Basehead" from Greens? "Basehead" is a song about the ravages of crack and how it affects communities, and how it affects the youth, and how it makes the environment a lot less safe. The main point I make is that when you're beholden to a substance, that's just like having chains on your feet, you know. It's like slavery. To me that's the new slavery, because the people who produce the crack are the ones who you never hear about. But you hear a lot about the users of it. It seems that those who bring it into the communities act with impunity, as they say, and get away with it. Because it's still always there, even though you hear about law enforcement catching people or whatnot, it doesn't really make a dent in the trade. So in a nutshell, that's what it's about. |
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