Tag: Reggie Harris

From Ray Charles to Yola, These 12 Black Voices Command Our Attention

Posted on by Editor

In recognition of Black History Month, we have compiled these 12 features from the Bluegrass Situation archives to reexamine the breadth and sheer talent that Black artists are bringing to the roots music community. For additional stories, and to hear much, much more music, check out our Black Voices page on BGS.

 

Ray Charles

The musical and cultural impact of Ray Charles is extraordinary and spans the pantheon of American popular music. He was an outstanding multi-instrumentalist (though best known for piano and alto sax), vocalist, bandleader, songwriter and composer in the non-lyrical sense. His innovations include helping craft and popularize the secularization of gospel music, now otherwise known as soul, and bringing new attention and expanded audiences to country music, which was the earliest idiom he loved and played before blues, jazz, R&B, or soul.

Though his earliest material was heavily influenced by Charles Brown and Nat “King” Cole, Charles (full name Ray Charles Robinson) quickly developed a highly stylized, immediately recognizable singing and playing approach. He became an expressive, evocative vocalist, one of the finest interpretative singers of all time, and a skilled improviser as an instrumentalist, able to deliver intense and memorable melodic statements or energetic solos while heading either small combos or large bands. Read more.

Robert Finley

 

Depending on how much attention one pays to labels, singer-songwriter Robert Finley could accurately be called both a blues and soul vocalist, even though he’s also performed plenty of gospel, and has a passionate faith that is often reflected in comments about his unlikely emergence as a national figure in his 60s.

“You can’t call it anything except the hand of God a lot of what’s happened in my life,” Finley tells BGS. “For me to be recording and performing now, to have met and established a friendship with a young white guy like Dan (the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach), and to be in the studio now recording and singing these songs when that’s what I’ve always wanted to do all my life, well it’s just God’s hand in my life.” Read more.

Reggie Harris

The joy and hope evident in Reggie Harris’ 2021 release, On Solid Ground, stem from a rooted sense of perseverance and from his intentional decision to face each and every moment, in the moment, and to find hope within each. It’s why such heavy topics don’t feel gargantuan or burdensome as they make appearances and anchor songs on the album. Harris, watching the social, political, and racial reckonings that bubbled onto the sidewalks and streets of every city in America over the course of the last year, didn’t sit down or give up in the face of the unclimbable summit of translating that reckoning into song.

Instead, Harris draws upon the wisdom, insight, and hope given to him by his own elders and communities throughout On Solid Ground. In choosing to keep himself open in each moment, Harris found himself receiving inspiration, nuggets of ideas and stories, glimpses of songs and arrangements in so many of those moments, simply because he was there, with a still heart and still soul, to receive them. Read more.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram

 

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram seemed to come out of nowhere with his 2019 Alligator Records debut, Kingfish. At 20 years old, the native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, emerged as a fully-formed guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter and was quickly hailed as a defining blues voice of his generation. Since then, he’s toured the nation, performed with acts ranging from alt-rockers Vampire Weekend to Americana star Jason Isbell to blues godfather Buddy Guy.

In the midst of all this success, just as his career was taking off amidst over a year of non-stop touring, he lost his mother, Princess Pride Ingram, a devastating blow that the young man had to overcome. All of this life experience is reflected on Ingram’s second album, 662, named after the area code for his North Mississippi home. Read more.

Amythyst Kiah

 

When Amythyst Kiah was a teenager in the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee, she wanted to be “the guitar-playing version of Tori Amos.” Locked away in her room with her headphones pulled over her ears, pouring over liner notes and listening intently for every nuance in her favorite records, she found solace in the way Amos told her darkest secrets in her songs and how she turned that vulnerability into something like a superpower. It made her feel less alone, especially as a young, closeted Black girl in a largely white suburb. Tori Amos helped her survive adolescence.

Kiah didn’t grow up to become any version of her hero. Instead, she simply became herself. Her new solo album, Wary + Strange, ingeniously mixes blues and folk with alternative and indie rock, devising a vivid palette to soundtrack her own songs that tell dark secrets. It’s one of the most bracing albums of the year, grappling with matters both personal (her mother’s suicide) and public (the struggles of Black Americans). “Now, when I’m in my mid-thirties,” says Kiah, “it’s amazing to make a vulnerable record and then have people at my shows tell me that my music helped them heal, helped them get through some hard times. To have someone connect with my music is really powerful.” Read more.

Keb’ Mo’

Keb’ Mo’ enjoyed a career milestone as he received a Lifetime Achievement in Performance Award from the Americana Music Association in 2021. Presented at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the award joins a list of distinctions that include five Grammys and 14 Blues Foundation Awards. But in typically understated fashion, Mo’ (a.k.a. Kevin Moore) downplayed the latest honor during his Artist of the Month interview with the Bluegrass Situation.

“Well, for me I guess it represents the fact I’m getting old,” he said with a laugh. “But sure, you are honored whenever you get that kind of recognition from your peers. But I’ve still got a lot that I want to do and I’m still looking ahead.” A huge indication of that is his outstanding new LP, Good to Be. It is both a tribute to his background growing up in Compton, California, and a celebration of some 11 years in his current hometown, Nashville. Read more.

Buffalo Nichols

 

As the first solo blues artist signed to Fat Possum Records in 20 years, Buffalo Nichols faces high expectations. But on his self-titled debut, the musician (whose given name is Carl Nichols) more than meets them, stitching Black history and musical traditions with current events and experiences to craft the sonic equivalent of a quilt. And the story it tells is an important one.

Nichols was born in Houston and raised in Milwaukee, but when he got the urge to roam and the money to do it, he took off, immersing himself in creative scenes across Europe and West Africa. Although he’s been based in Austin since the fall of 2020, Nichols channels the Delta, North Mississippi and Chicago through his nimble fingers or resonator slide while wrapping his warm voice around words that cut to the core of oppression, and the many forms of heartbreak it causes. Read more.

Chris Pierce

 

Chris Pierce has cultivated a significant following in the Los Angeles area and beyond, usually writing soulful and emotional songs that have populated fifteen years’ worth of albums and appeared in TV shows like This Is Us. But in 2020, accompanied by little more than his 1949 Gibson J-45 (“Blondie”) or his 1973 Martin D-18 (“Doriella”), the California native recorded the album American Silence with a mission of social activism against racial disparities.

Pierce gained a love of language from his mother, an English teacher who taught at-risk youth. She introduced him to the lyrical writings of Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss, as well as essential writers like Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. The economy of words in all of those authors is immediately evident in original compositions like “American Silence” and “It’s Been Burning for a While,” where Pierce gets his point across directly, and with power. His convictions are never more optimistically presented than in the album’s closing anthem, “Young, Black and Beautiful,” which details the experience of maturing from a cute little kid to a perceived threat. Read more.

 

Allison Russell

 

Within the songs of her new album Outside Child, Allison Russell delves deeply into the extreme trauma she experienced in her youth spent in Montreal both as a mechanism for personal relief, but also in the hopes that it might reach people with similar experiences.

“The writing process was having to delve deeply into the most painful parts of my past and childhood and history,” she says. “I experienced severe childhood abuse, sexual, physical, mental, and psychological. In many ways, I think the psychological is the toughest part to unpack and defang. I don’t know that I am ever going to be entirely free of that and the process of dealing with that. What was very beautiful about this to me is that I didn’t have to go on that fearsome journey alone. My partner J.T. [Nero] was with me every step of the way. He co-wrote many of the songs on this record with me. He scraped me up off the floor when I was in the depths of it.” Read more.

Tray Wellington

Banjo player Tray Wellington was everywhere to be found during the 2021 IBMA World of Bluegrass — performing, hosting the Momentum Awards luncheon, and playing a main stage set at the Red Hat Amphitheater. This is remarkable because if you had looked for Wellington at IBMA just a few short years ago, you might not have run into him except on the youth stage or in the halls, jamming.

Catapulted by his prior work with the talented young band Cane Mill Road, his studies at East Tennessee State University’s bluegrass program, and a stable of accomplished and connected mentors and peers, Wellington went from a newbie to a seasoned veteran faster than a global pandemic could subside — and during it. Efforts for better and more accurate representation in bluegrass have contributed to his momentum (no pun intended), but above all, his talent and his envelope-pushing approach to the five-string banjo are the root causes of his mounting and well-deserved notoriety. Read more.

Yasmin Williams

 

Guitarists spend lifetimes — often gleefully, sometimes manically, or at times frustratingly — finessing techniques, especially with their picking hand. Entire careers can be made or broken by the idiosyncrasies of one picker’s striking and sounding strings. Fingerstyle guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams has mastered myriad forms of right-hand styles, each complicated enough for multiple lifetimes’ worth of study. But she doesn’t merely alternate techniques between pieces; to a transcendentally perplexing degree she effortlessly alternates her entire picking hand approach mid-song.

On her 2021 release, Urban Driftwood, a collection of thoughtful, dynamic, and engaging instrumentals written for fingerstyle guitar and harp guitar, Williams makes many of these technique-swaps while the compositions charge forward, each one earning tailor-made right-hand approaches. As a result, the songs don’t feel encumbered when Williams, mid-melody, goes from right hand fingerstyle to bowing her strings with a cello bow, or plunking out notes on a kalimba taped to her guitar’s face, now positioned laying across her lap. She utilizes hand percussion and tap shoes to fill out arrangements, interposing Afro-descended instruments from around the world into her compositions, and she picks up, puts down, and readjusts her stable of musical tools in real time — as a foley sound effect artist, prop master, or choreographer might. Read more.

Yola

Speaking to Yola over Zoom is way more fun than a video call has any right to be. From the time she dials in from the UK, she’s ready to chat. Good thing, because there’s a lot to talk about. About a week earlier, she picked up two Grammy nominations in the American Roots Music category of Best American Roots Song (“Diamond Studded Shoes”) and Best Americana Album (Stand For Myself), and she’s clearly still exhilarated by it.

“It’s very hard for it to even land because it feels really super surreal,” she says. “I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m endlessly grateful to the work that everyone puts in to get me to this point, and honestly, the faith that people have to let me lead at all. I wasn’t always in positions like that, ones that would let me lead.”

She’s speaking of a different kind of leadership style than, say, former British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose sparkly footwear worn during a speech about childhood poverty led to the idea of writing “Diamond Studded Shoes.” Although it does have a feel-good groove, you can’t miss its message of inequality. “And that’s why we gots to fight,” she sings. Read more.

Photo Credit: Norman Seff (Ray Charles); Alysse Gafkjen (Robert Finley); Courtesy of Reggie Harris (Reggie Harris); Justin Hardiman (Christone “Kingfish” Ingram); Sandlin Gaither (Amythyst Kiah); Jeremy Cowart (Keb’ Mo’); Merrick Ales (Buffalo Nichols); Mathieu Bitton (Chris Pierce); Laura E. Partain (Allison Russell); Mountain Home Music Company (Tray Wellington); Kim Atkins Photography (Yasmin Williams); Joseph Ross Smith (Yola)

Folk Hero Reggie Harris Faces a Moment of Reckoning ‘On Solid Ground’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Reggie Harris is a songwriter, storyteller, educator, and folk icon. No, literally. This year, Harris was awarded The Spirit of Folk Award from Folk Alliance International — as well as W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Award by the Du Bois Legacy Festival in Great Barrington, Mass. His career as a folksinger has spanned four decades, with musical collaborators and activist compatriots such as Pete Seeger, Dr. Kim Harris, C.T. Vivian, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Greg Greenway, David Roth, and many more. BGS is proud to host Harris on the sixth episode of our Shout & Shine livestream series on Wednesday, June 23 at 4pm PDT / 7pm EDT. (Tune in here via the video player below, our YouTube channel, or our Facebook page.)

The joy and hope evident in Harris’ 2021 release, On Solid Ground, stem from a rooted sense of perseverance and from his intentional decision to face each and every moment, in the moment, and to find hope within each. It’s why such heavy topics don’t feel gargantuan or burdensome as they make appearances and anchor songs on the album. Harris, watching the social, political, and racial reckonings that bubbled onto the sidewalks and streets of every city in America over the course of the last year, didn’t sit down or give up in the face of the unclimbable summit of translating that reckoning into song. 

Instead, Harris draws upon the wisdom, insight, and hope given to him by his own elders and communities throughout On Solid Ground. In choosing to keep himself open in each moment, Harris found himself receiving inspiration, nuggets of ideas and stories, glimpses of songs and arrangements in so many of those moments, simply because he was there, with a still heart and still soul, to receive them.

On Solid Ground feels solid and grounded, but also soars – unencumbered by whatever aspects of its content and lyrics might be perceived as pitfalls or minefields to so many. Harris, as only a folksinger-storyteller can, weaves a reality that can indeed rise to the occasion of this twenty-first century civil rights movement. We just have to choose to be present to usher in that reality — which, it’s important to note, will have an excellent soundtrack.

BGS caught up with Reggie Harris over the phone on May 28, Memorial Day weekend and the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.

BGS: I wanted to start off with “It’s Who We Are,” which leads off the album. It makes the point that the political and social turmoil of the last few years aren’t really anything new, but rather are pretty natural outgrowths of who we’ve always been — as a culture and as a society. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you wanted to reinforce that point and kick off your album with that song? You’re making the point that this isn’t an aberration, this is who we are. 

RH: [Laughs] I do a lot of work, a lot of educational and historical performing — both in schools and around the country — and the question always comes up, with audiences of all ages, “How far have we come?” And, “Who are we?” These things happen around the country, incidents like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and also the incident in New York City with the Coopers — Amy Cooper and [Black birder, Christian Cooper]. People are constantly tweeting as if [these incidents] are one-offs, that each is an aberration. So I’d been working on writing a song for a while that basically says our nation was founded with white supremacy and racial issues from the very beginning. And we have been struggling with that. Obviously, we have made some progress over time, but we see that these things are so temporary — and the proliferation of them over the last two years particularly, and through the pandemic, really brought it to the fore. 

I kept looking at all of that, and I started writing that song– I’m not a writer that likes to just put things out there, constantly pointing out all the difficult and sometimes dangerous events. I love to tie into hope and I couldn’t talk my way through it. I wrote about twenty-seven verses. And it was getting more and more dark all the time! [Laughs] 

Even this week, we’re acknowledging the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a hundred years ago. All of those — there are so many of those incidents and events, I really wanted to say, “Yes. This is our legacy, this really is who we are.” But, there is something about what is happening, particularly with young people, particularly in the last year. So, when I saw people flooding into the streets all across the nation, in Portland, Louisville, and all these places I saw the diversity of faces and the diversity of ages. I thought, “You know, something has changed.” We’ve had a lot of false starts in our nation, but that became the critical point when I sing, “Yes, we can change! / Reshape the future of our reality.” We can define ourselves. Any way we choose to.

I have to admit, when I finished recording the song, I turned to Greg Greenway, my co-producer, and said, “I don’t know if I want to put this first.” [Laughs] We went back and forth and back and forth and finally — I was actually going to begin with Malvina Reynolds’ “It Isn’t Nice” and Greg turned to me one day and said, “No, this is the album statement. I think we gotta just put it out there.” And I said yes, and there you go! You need to have some courage in the work that you do. I’ve been looking to people like C.T. Vivian and John Lewis and all the sacrifices that people like Fannie Lou Hamer made. And all the amazing icons of civil rights history. 

As I was thinking about this point — that this is exactly who we are and always have been — I was listening to “Let’s Meet Up Early,” and there’s a lyric, “It ain’t no mystery… don’t try to act surprised.” 

[Laughs]

So this is a point you are making indelibly across the record! [Laughs]

Yes, well it is. And this came out of about three weeks of just sitting at home, watching the nation unravel. I wrote “On Solid Ground,” because that’s kind of where I live, you know, in the spirituals, saying that we can make it through this, we can persevere. But we can’t make it through it if we don’t acknowledge it. 

Exactly.

I’m glad you bring up perseverance, because something I find striking about the record is that even though the songs do feel that they carry strong messages and morals, and explicit calls for justice and equity — and perseverance — they don’t feel too heavy, they don’t feel burdened by the gravity of the issues they confront. Like, “Maybe It’s Love” is very whimsical and wry and sweet. And you just mentioned “On Solid Ground,” which is gorgeous, but really also fun, a cappella, bouncy and bubbly with cheer. How do you strike that balance, when you’re thinking about writing music that has a strong sense of conviction like this, but you do want it to also evoke hope and joy?

I feel very blessed to have come up in a community in Philadelphia and throughout that demonstrated having hope. The folks that I grew up with, in Philadelphia, my elders, and then as I progressed not only as a person, but as a musician I have had such amazing [role models]. If you look at the musicians — and all those folks in my community, they’d sing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round!” And, “Oh, Freedom:” “Before I’d be a slave/ I’d be buried in my grave/” 

One day we will be free. And we’re going to keep working at this. 

We had C.T. Vivian at a conference I helped to put on in 2015 and he said, “We knew that we were working for something bigger than ourselves. We knew that we needed to have good leadership — and we did. We knew that we were working in the frame of love. For something, not against.” I try to keep those messages at the forefront of my writing, at the forefront of my performing. I know that a lot of white Americans have trouble embracing a lot of this because it brings up a lot of guilt, or it brings up this feeling there’s this huge thing you weren’t aware of. I just want to say to people: There are forces and systems that are trying to make sure you don’t know about this stuff. You’re not to blame for not knowing, but once you know — I think it was Maya Angelou that said, “When you know better you do better.” [Laughs] 

I look at that and my own role in this is just to pass along what was given to me. I came up in a community that understood the nature of perseverance, that understood the nature of hope and working towards hope realizing that you’re not going to get everything at once. But, you might get some of it and then you pass that along. I think the songs, for me, are conduits to giving away this gift that I’ve been given. As I write I just always try to remember that people always gave me hope – and they did it mostly through songs. 

As I was reading some of the song inspirations and contexts in the liner notes, I noticed you seem to really keep yourself so open to inspiration and new song ideas. You mention that “Come What May” came to you right after one of your regular livestreams and you began writing “Tree of Life” you were teaching. How do you keep your mind — and your heart — open to those kernels of inspirations, when new song ideas present themselves to you?

I’m not a writer who’s working at it all the time. I know friends of mine, folks who sit down every day and they either write a song or they tape something. I’ve never been that way, I really have kind of evolved into a person who’s eyes-wide-open in the moment. I’m very much focused on what’s happening around me and focused on noticing those opportunities. That’s one of the things that doing a lot of work with kids [has honed]. You really have to be present with kids. [Laughs] You come in with an idea of what you want to do, but if it feels at all like you aren’t including them or that you aren’t present, they’ll entertain themselves! I think I’ve developed a real sense of being in the moment, being charged with seeing those small windows of opportunity. Of course, I had a lot more of them in the pandemic! [Laughs] At home an unbelievably impressive amount of time. 

A lot of it is also balancing. I’m very careful not to watch the news early in the day. I think my liver transplant, in 2008, really shifted me, in a way. It changed the temperature of my observations in the world. I think that it’s really benefited my writing, because as I approach life living hour by hour, I notice things. I live out in the country, so I have time and atmosphere to hear myself think. Particularly with the time I started writing the album, right at the end of March [2020]. I’m kind of in my own element, I’m watching, carefully and selectively, what’s happening in the world, but I’m also in an environment where my heart and soul could get quiet. I love what happens when those two things occur. It allows me to then go to that other place and to find the message. 

A lot of times when you start to write a song, you think you know what you’re going to say. [Laughs] And the song has another idea altogether! It might be pulling things out of your subconscious you might have been working on for months — or years! It could be a thought I jotted down in my journal, or some phrase that I had been playing with. I think, for several of the songs, I was doing these online performances and it could just be the look in some peoples’ eyes as I sang a song. Or some comment someone would leave. Someone once said, “I wasn’t going to tune in, but you look hopeful.” I thought, “Wow, what a responsibility.” I try to carry that responsibility and be accountable for not making things… harder than the world. 

Lead photo: Courtesy of Reggie Harris
Inset photo: Anthony Salamone