Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs and Salvation of Cornbread Harris
Photo of Cornbread Harris by David Pierini
Excerpted from Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris by Andrea Swensson. From the University of Minnesota Press, August 2024. Copyright 2024 by Andrea Swensson. Used by permission.
Chapter 6, “Tell Me I’m Your Man.”
In 1985, Cornbread experienced something of a creative rebirth while playing with the Ice Blue Blues Band, also known simply as ICE. By this time he had settled in North Minneapolis and purchased the home where he still lived when we met. It was there that he connected with a musician in the neighborhood named Joe Rowe who would become a close friend and significant creative collaborator.
Whereas Cornbread had spent the bulk of his career performing in what one might describe, in large brushstrokes, as white venues for audiences of predominantly white diners, drinkers, and dancers—from the teen dance halls of his Augie Garcia days to the supper clubs on Lake Minnetonka and swanky piano bars of downtown Minneapolis—Rowe’s experiences more closely mirrored those of other Black artists from the North Side who were struggling to make a living playing traditionally Black music like the blues.
This was an era when Prince was at the height of his fame with Purple Rain; Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were scoring major hits writing and producing artists like the S.O.S. Band, Cherrelle, and Alexander O’Neal; and dozens of wannabe superstars and eagle-eyed A&R execs were streaming into the Twin Cities in search of the newfangled Minneapolis Sound that combined traditionally Black art forms like R&B, soul, and the blues with electronic dance beats, new wave synthesizers, and modern rock guitar playing.
Even as a new generation of Black artists were putting Minneapolis on the map, musicians of Cornbread’s generation like Joe Rowe noticed a troubling trend: the scene’s Black predecessors and cultural practitioners were being edged out.
Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs and Salvation of Cornbread Harris. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press
With the Ice Blue Blues Band, Rowe, who performed as JaJa Lateef, sought to “bring the real blues, Black blues, back to the Twin Cities.” Speaking to the North Minneapolis newspaper Insight News in May 1985, Rowe said, “You got to be Black to have lived through the suffering. . . . To have a feeling, like you’d get from listening to your grandparents. Look at the great players, B. B. King, Albert King, and a whole bunch more. They knew that feeling.”
The reporter for the paper, Arnold Stead, agreed with Rowe’s assessment that the blues was nearing a point of extinction in the local scene. “That the field of Black bluesmen, resident in the Twin Cities, is near zero cannot be denied,” he wrote. “The blues clubs here import their Black performers from Chicago, even then these clubs have a tough go of it. Artists that fill stadiums in Germany and Japan are lucky to fill a saloon in Minnesota.”
With the Ice Blue Blues Band, Rowe and Cornbread worked up a robust repertoire of standards that included the blues as well as some jazz and R&B songs. Cornbread, the eldest of the group, played keyboards and sang, Rowe played drums, and Lewis James joined in on guitar. A woman named B. J. Lewis entered the mix when she asked Cornbread if he knew how to get ahold of his chart-topping son. According to the Insight article, “The veteran keyboardist didn’t know the whereabouts of his offspring,” but once he and his bandmates heard Lewis sing, they invited her to join the group. Later on, the lineup would evolve into a trio with Jim Levy on guitar.
Looking back on his days in the Ice Blue Blues Band, Cornbread said he appreciated the fact that it was a true collaboration with his friend Joe Rowe. “We were co-leaders of the band. And that kinda reminds me of Jimmy and Terry, you know, two guys working together—and actually working together, not fighting each other or nothing,” he noted. “Agreeing and getting something done together. Ice Blues band went quite well.”
After spending nearly a year woodshedding in Joe Rowe’s dining room and recording a demo tape of some of their favorite standards (including “Saturday Nite Fish Fry,” “In the Dark,” and “C. C. Rider”), the band started playing out and quickly earned the respect of their peers. By the end of the ’80s they would perform at the Riverview Supper Club, a Minnesota Black Musicians Awards ceremony at Orchestra Hall, and the massive RiverFest on Harriet Island in St. Paul. In a preview of the 1990 RiverFest event, the Star Tribune reported, “This Twin Cities band seems to surface only at RiverFest to play smokin’, horn-accentuated blues.”
By the end of the ’80s, Cornbread’s music career started gaining momentum in a way he hadn’t experienced in decades. He credited this spike in activity and attention to the fact that he had finally reached the point where he could retire from his multiple day jobs, which toward the end included working for both the foundry and what he referred to as “the packing house,” a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul where he wore out his arms stretching leather hides. Finally free of other commitments, he started saying yes to every single live performance opportunity that came his way.
Cornbread Harris performing at the Cora McCorvey Health and Wellness Center. Photo by David
Ask anyone who was active in the Twin Cities music scene in the 1990s when they learned about Cornbread Harris, and they will likely either say that they first saw him down at Nikki’s Cafe in the Warehouse District, or at the old Loring Bar on Loring Park. Cornbread estimates that between those two venues he must have played hundreds, if not thousands, of shows in that decade; in the process, he solidified his reputation as a heartfelt, charming, endlessly entertaining live performer who was as much a part of the atmosphere at these establishments as the food and drinks.
It was Cornbread’s weekly residency at Nikki’s Cafe that earned him his first piece of major local press. On November 1, 1990, the Star Tribune ran a profile of Cornbread written by the veteran music critic Jon Bream. More than forty years into his career, it was the first time that his life’s work and his story had received such a glowing spotlight.
“Harris knows his way around a piano,” Bream wrote. “During a solo he may take listeners on a tour of America’s favorite blues towns—Kansas City, Chicago, and New Orleans. His instrumental excursions invariably define the mood of a piece. He leans toward a happy, almost club-style blues.” The article noted that Cornbread had worked up more than a hundred songs to include in his repertoire, with a special focus on the blues, in addition to nearly fifty songs that he’d composed himself. It also highlighted how he loved to take requests. “I’m a public servant,” Cornbread told the paper. “I’ll play for the king, I’ll play for the queen. I’ll play for the bums on the street. I’m there to play.”
When I read this article to Cornbread, he squealed with delight and clapped his hands in approval. “Oh, they got me down to a T! They really nailed it,” he said, beaming.
“Nikki’s was kind of my start-out place on my fame trip,” Cornbread added. “I held jam sessions. And the musicians would come in to play with me. And I would have them come and do whatever they could do. Yeah, blow your horn, play your drums, play your bongos, shake your tambourine. You know, whatever. Come on in and we’ll play music together. And it worked out really beautiful.”
The first musician to join Cornbread at Nikki’s was his nephew, Renee Phiefer, whom Cornbread taught to play the drum kit shortly before he started up the Nikki’s residency. “I always played the drums but never played the drums until I got with my uncle, who helped me learn how to play,” Phiefer told me. “I played the drums with him from 1990 to ’92. So I played a few years.”
When asked about what it was like to be in a band with Cornbread, Renee said, “Well, I was with my uncle, so it was fun. I enjoyed myself. I mean, people came from all over to see us. I met a lot of people from all over the world.”
Because of the proximity of Nikki’s to other musical hot spots like the Fine Line, the New French Café, Metro Studio and several rehearsal warehouses, Renee said that there were often music industry bigwigs passing through and taking interest in their performances. “I mean, there was a lot of times that record companies would come up to us and say how much they loved us. And they’d say they’d call us and then wouldn’t call, and that was the way it was. And sometimes when we were at Nikki’s, Prince’s band would be playing across the street. They would come over when they were taking a break to listen to Cornbread and I play music.”
“I remember seeing him out there a lot,” said Tommy Barbarella, a founding member of Prince’s New Power Generation who also played occasionally at Nikki’s. “I hung out there a lot. I loved [proprietor] Nikki [Reisman], she would always be at the bar. And Cornbread had that harmonica holder around his neck, but it was a coat hanger? It was awesome.”
Veteran local troubadour Paul Metsa also remembered first connecting with Cornbread at Nikki’s. “He’s one of our hidden heroes,” Paul said. “I’ve always loved the guy—you can’t help but love him. With Cornbread, it was as fun hanging out yakking on the break as it was to see him play. Guys like Cornbread and I, those house gigs were our bread and butter.”
Metsa said that all these years later, he can still remember specific songs that Cornbread played at Nikki’s. “He played us this song, I think it was called ‘Ghost Ship,’ and it just knocked me out,” he recalled. “It was like a ’40s tune, a bluesy tune about this ghost ship—it just knocked me out. But that was the beauty of Cornbread: his repertoire was so vast. There were always nuggets that you’d stumble into. He’s a storyteller’s storyteller.”
The drummer Jack Chaffee, who took over on the kit once Renee stopped gigging, said that performing alongside Cornbread at Nikki’s taught him an important lesson about taking the job seriously. “Weeknights, I mean, sometimes we had three, four audience members. But Cornbread never cared how many people were in the audience, whether it was one person, or one hundred people. He was going to play his show from this time to that time, and we never stopped early. Doesn’t matter who’s there; if nobody’s there, we’re still playing. And that was just who he was. I always respected that.”
Ever the hard-working hustler looking out for the next performance opportunity, Cornbread was able to parlay the buzz around his residency into all sorts of gigs throughout the rest of the ’90s, from the Loring to regular stints playing on the riverboats that launched off of Harriet Island in St. Paul. He has especially fond memories of holding down recurring gigs on the Anson Northrop riverboat, where he played countless special events.
“That’s where I got into marriages and stuff, playing on the boat,” Cornbread recalled. “People would hire the boat, they would get the music, and I would be the band. So that worked out quite good.” By the mid-’90s, his schedule was packed with private parties, weddings, funerals, fundraisers, and galas that were booked by people who had seen him play on the boat or at one of his house gigs.
In 1995, Cornbread reached another career milestone: he recorded his first album of his own material, Live at Nikki’s. Cornbread’s longtime bass player and friend Scott Soule remembers the album well—he had just joined the band a month prior to the recording. “That was recorded on March 4 and 5, 1995,” Scott recalled. He said that drummer Jack Chaffee had a big hand in making the record happen, and that other musicians were eager to come down and sit in. “Paul Sanders was one, Tom Zosel was on it, Clark Upton played the trumpet, and then Howard Wright was the guitar player. Brilliant man. The thing about Nikki’s was it was a really nice sounding room, with wood floors. It was a good atmosphere. So that’s why I think it became so popular for him.”
Live at Nikki’s begins with the sound of warm audience chatter and Cornbread’s voice cutting through the din, telling the story of how he got his name and breaking into “The Cornbread Song.” The interaction between the singer and his audience is immediately apparent; after each line you can hear people in the room whooping and egging him on, and by the time the whole band joins in you can practically feel the tables full of patrons bobbing their heads to the beat.
“He sort of had a regular crowd of people that would come see him—we had the Nikki’s crowd,” Jack Chaffee recalled. “And Cornbread would remember everybody. Oftentimes when he saw someone come in, he would play a song that he knew they liked. It was common for a singer to come in, and he would see them and say, ‘Come up and sing that song.’ He would create an atmosphere in the room where everybody felt like they were a part of everything. Which was always really cool.”
“Yeah, we had a lot of people who would come in there. There was a guy who lived around the corner who would come in practically every night,” added Scott. “I mean, there were a lot of people who had relationships that were sort of solidified around the music of James Samuel ‘Cornbread’ Harris Sr.”
Live at Nikki’s was released on cassette tape in 1995 and on CD in the summer of 1996, and it earned Cornbread another round of positive local press, including at least one rave review. Finally, after nearly fifty years of performing regularly in the Twin Cities, he had been fully embraced by the area’s tastemakers and scenesters as an important figure in local music—a legacy that would continue to be solidified over the next thirty years of his ever-evolving career.