Bessie Harris
Barry’s mother; Baptist church pianist
Bessie Harris was Barry’s mother, a Baptist church pianist in Detroit who had earlier been a teacher in Georgia; she started him on piano at four and later let him choose jazz over church music.
- mentions
- 8
- recordings
- 6
- Barry speaking
- 4
What Barry says
His mother was a church pianist and the one who got him started. He played his first piece, a church song, at four, perhaps from watching over her shoulder, and he says he was closer to her because of the piano. His classical lessons came from other teachers; her side was the church music.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶36Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶70Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶74Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶84Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶46Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶160
Barry rates her as a good pianist of the old Baptist kind, unlike today’s church players, who he thinks sound sanctified. Whatever key a singer started in, she was right there with them, which he calls pretty hip.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶38Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶40
Once she showed him a few licks she used to play, and they were not quite church licks, so he gathered she knew something else too. Of the children who took up music only Barry stayed with it, and he calls himself a continuation of Bessie.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶62Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶64Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶66
The family lived in a flat behind the church, so they were there all the time, and church music was all he heard at home as a boy. She stayed the church pianist for many years, and Barry thinks she died around 1991.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶60Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶86Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶88
He tells the same turning point in several interviews: after he had played for the junior choir, his mother, whom he remembers as gentle and beautiful, asked whether he meant to play church music or jazz. He chose jazz, and she was fine with it.
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland6:10The Spirit of Bebop13:4614:19Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶55Ted Panken, For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday ¶6
Before she came north she was a teacher in Georgia. Much later, when Barry guesses he was in his twenties, the town of Toccoa had her come there as perhaps its oldest person, since she could tell them more about the town than anyone, and gave her the key to the town.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶42Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶44Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶46Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶52
She made their home the young musicians’ base: she let them play all day in her flat and cooked what little food there was while they jammed. As a young player he still had to ask her leave to go and work in Pontiac.
The Spirit of Bebop24:36Ted Panken, For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday ¶15Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶170
On Piano Jazz he tells Marian McPartland that a church song was expected at his concerts, above all when his mother came. Once, with two concerts in a day, he left it out of the first because she was coming to the second; people still ask him for one.
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland5:36
In his own words
My mother was a pianist, so I got started through my mother. So I say that I was closer to her, you know, because of the piano.
my mother was a good pianist too, you know. She was one of them pianists, man – you start singing, she starts playing.
My mother was a very gentle and beautiful person. One day my mother said to me, “What do you want to do? Are you going to play the church music or are you going to play the jazz?”
I have continued the family tradition of music, you know. I’m just a continuation of Bessie, you know.
I was lucky. I had a house, my mother would fix food for us, what little food we had, but she’d fix it and we’d jam all day.
Every mention
8 moments in the recordings, 4 of them Barry speaking. Each says who is talking.
The Spirit of Bebop
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland
Barry Harris Spanish TV
- 14:31
Someone else
A Spanish TV narrator: his mother gave his first lessons at four, backed his choice of jazz, sheltered his friends.
Interview: tap dance and bebop
- 30:25
Someone else
A Portuguese-language podcast reads his translated 1998 answer: his mother was a church pianist, so church music came first.
Barry Harris Funeral
- 52:25
Someone else
A pianist speaking at Barry’s funeral remarks that Barry and his mother played for a church in Detroit.
The Great Pianist Barry Harris’ Funeral At Abyssinian Baptist Church In Harlem
- 38:34
Someone else
The same funeral tribute in another recording: Barry’s mother and Barry played for a Detroit church.
In the interviews and notes
Asked his parents’ names, Barry says his mother was Bessie and his father Melvin. His parents went their separate ways after a while, and he says he knows little about his father.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶20Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶54Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶58
Asked who started him, Barry answers simply: his mother. Nearly every house then had a piano and someone to play it. Most of them, he says, began at four as church pianists until a parting of ways came; when his mother asked which music he would play, he chose jazz.
Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶46Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶48Barry Harris on WKCR-FM ¶55
When Panken asks whether his mother also gave him classical lessons, Barry says no: she was the church side, and his classical teachers were Neptune Holloway, Mrs. Lipscomb and later Gladys Dillard.
Barry started working young; he remembers having to ask his mother whether he could go to play in Pontiac, and needing somewhere to stay there for a couple of days.
In the DownBeat feature Barry says his mother started him in church and later let him choose jazz, and that she let the young musicians play all day in her flat, so his house became the place everyone came to.
Ted Panken, For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday ¶6Ted Panken, For Barry Harris’ 82nd Birthday ¶15
When the interviewer suggests that his mother’s love kept him away from drugs, Barry gives the credit more to being brought up in church, which left his generation feeling someone above was watching over them.
Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶282Barry Harris, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program ¶283
When Barry phoned his old teacher Neptune Holloway, perhaps in the 1980s, he tried to jog the man’s memory by naming his mother, Bessie Harris; Holloway still did not remember him.
Stryker writes that Barry’s formal training started with his mother, a church pianist, while jazz he learned informally, like every musician of his generation, by playing with others and copying solos off records.
De Lima names Bessie Harris as Barry’s earliest teacher and says she was pianist at Zion Hill Baptist Church and taught him from the age of four. Barry’s own interviews in this archive do not name the church.
Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶687Brian Jude de Lima, Reanimating Dissonance: Cultivating the Antecedents of Barry Harris’ Concept of Movement as a Multidimensional Pedagogical Tool for Ontario Post-Secondary Jazz Curricula ¶729
García-Valdecasas notes that Barry’s first lessons came from his mother, a Baptist church pianist, so his first repertoire was sacred music, and that he remembers his first piece, at four, as a church song in B flat.
Method ideas nearby
Ideas of the method taught in the classes where they come up, with how many mentions fall in each.