A legend, an estrangement and a reconciliation in ‘Cornbread’ Harris bio, ‘Deeper Blues’

In 1954, James “Cornbread” Harris Jr. joined the Augie Garcia Quintet, which performed almost every night at the River Road Club in Mendota. A year later, the band released a 45, featuring “Hi Ho Silver,” their biggest hit, and “Going to Chicago” on the B-side. The disc is viewed as Minnesota’s first rock ‘n’ roll record.

In “Deeper Blues,” Andrea Swensson, a music journalist and author of “Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound,” draws on extensive conversations with Harris and other research to provide an engaging portrait of a consummate entertainer who has been a fixture on the Twin Cities music scene for 70 years.

Struggling to make a living as blues, boogie-woogie and jazz performers gave way to Elvis, the Beatles, electric guitars, new wave and disco, Cornbread worked days at the American Hoist and Derrick foundry and other odd jobs. He appeared at night with a succession of bands in cafes, bars, supper clubs, private parties and riverboats, a schedule that contributed to the dissolution of several marriages. He performed into his 80s and 90s, Swensson writes, solidifying his “reputation as a heartfelt, charming, endlessly entertaining live performer.”

What makes “Deeper Blues” especially moving and memorable is Swensson’s account of music’s pivotal role in the separation, estrangement and reconciliation of Cornbread and his son. He’s James “Jimmy Jam” Harris III, a protégé of Prince and Grammy-winning songwriter, with 41 Top Ten hits, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.

In the 1970s, when his wife intensified her demands that he end his music career, Cornbread moved out of the house. Jimmy was about 15 at the time. The quiet, passive avoidance of father and son turned into a decades-long estrangement. Determined to bring them together and convinced that the best way to do it was slowly, indirectly, and “on the slant,” rather than rehashing why they had drifted apart, Swensson arranged Zoom meetings, gift exchanges, visits and occasions to make music together.

By design or chance, the lyrics of the songs Cornbread and Jimmy Jam selected, Swensson reveals, paved the way to reconciliation. “Human,” the song Jimmy Jam wrote with Terry Lewis in 1986, for example, contains the lines, “Born to make mistakes/ (I am just a man) human/ Please forgive me/ The tears I cry aren’t tears of pain/ They’re only to hide my guilt and shame/ I forgive you, now I ask the same of you/ While we were apart, I was human too.”

When Cornbread sang “Me and my baby had a falling out/ I don’t even remember what it was all about,” from “Seems Like A Dream,” a standard, he looked at his son and smiled. The moment hit Swensson “like an arrow to the heart.”

Reprising the tension built into a jazz composition and transitioning “into a more serene major chord,” Swensson writes, Cornbread and Jimmy Jam Harris were returning “to the root note” and a crystal-clear harmony.

“Deeper Blues” gives new meaning to the old aphorism “better late than never.” And to the hope expressed in one of Swensson’s favorite Cornbread original instrumental tunes: “Never-Ending Love Song.”

Glenn C. Altschuler is an emeritus professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris

By: Andrea Swensson.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press. 200 pages, $22.95.

Event: Book launch with Cornbread Harris, Jimmy Jam Harris and Swensson, 8 p.m. (7 p.m. doors) Aug. 16. Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Av., Mpls., $30/$35 day of show, upress.umn.edu.