Corey Harris – It’s all about showing my process of education
ND: So how did the roots music, and specifically blues, first enter the picture for you?
CH: Through checking out my mom’s record collection, and what my sister was listening to…and at church and community events, things like that. Even living in the suburbs, we went to church in Denver.
IV. WE WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING INTIMATE
ND: How formal was your training as a musician?
CH: I first started out, really young, with piano lessons, then I played recorder, violin, and for five years, trumpet. I learned to read music before I ever touched a guitar.
ND: Then, in your first big move, you went off to Bates College, in Maine, to study anthropology and languages, then on to the Cameroons. Were you always good with languages? I’m sure for many viewers it was a surprise, in the Scorsese PBS series The Blues, when suddenly you were speaking conversational French with the people in Mali — and that you can even write lyrics multilingually.
CH: I always had that ability; and I could mimic my favorite cartoon characters, too! I was in western France, then the Cameroons for semesters during school; afterward, I went back there or another ten months. I was really interested, ultimately, in how black people in America come to speak English like we do, in the roots of black English, and to place that into the larger world of black English in the Caribbean and West Africa.
ND: So how did these interests and your musical interests get connected?
CH: A lot of that came together in college, through my study of people like Zora Neale Hurston — a big influence — and Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and even Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison and Alice Walker.
ND: All writers with musical interests. Is there a preservationist or even folklorist aspect to what you do, then, as there was for Hurston?
CH: I don’t really feel that I have to preserve this music, because it’s much bigger than me. I’m just trying to erase the ignorance that I have; for me it’s all about showing my process of education, in hoping that other people will be educated in a similar way. They don’t have to come to the same conclusions that I did, or do what I did.
ND: When you head off on trips like your recent Mali excursions, what are you looking for?
CH: I wasn’t just interested in going there and copping licks. I wanted to sit with people and have an exchange with them. I was seeking knowledge, but also felt that I had something to offer. For a lot of them, this was actually their first chance to sit down with somebody black who plays blues, and something identifiably from America.
I’ve definitely improved my technique, for one thing, just by observing people playing guitars, and stringed instruments of all types, seeing how their fingers interact with the strings, and the methods they use. And my ears have grown; I can hear intervals in their music that used to sound quite strange to me.
And I’ve got a more holistic view of music and how to play it with other people. It’s really all about establishing an open channel for communication, a rapport, prior to playing. We can sit down and play, have a meal, talk, meet the person’s family, become comfortable. Because we want to make something intimate, and a record of interaction that’s intimate beyond just words.