Book Review: Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris by Andrea Swensson (2024)

The cover of Deeper Blues: the Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris, by Andrea Swensson, 2024.

Cornbread Harris is one of the treasures of Minnesota’s music scene. Cornbread has been entertaining audiences in the Twin Cities with his piano playing since the late 1940’s, and on April 23rd, he will turn 98 years old. Cornbread’s fascinating life story is told in the excellent 2024 book Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris. The book was written by Andrea Swensson, who began meeting weekly with Cornbread at his home in 2021 to discuss his life and career. 

Cornbread Harris is one of those musicians who defies easy categorization. You can call his music blues, jazz, rock and roll, but the truth is that it’s a mixture of all of those things, plus more besides. Swensson deftly navigates the reader through Harris’s decades in the Twin Cities music scene. Her research into Harris’s life and career is thorough and comprehensive, and it’s fascinating to see how the tidbits she uncovers spark memories for Cornbread. Harris has many notable accomplishments in his long career. He played piano with the Augie Garcia Quintet on “Hi Ho Silver,” most likely the first rock and roll record made in Minnesota. The Augie Garcia Quintet was also the opening act for Elvis Presley at Presley’s first Minnesota concert appearance at the Saint Paul Auditorium in 1956. Garcia’s group was such a hit that Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker yanked them off the stage, afraid they might upstage Elvis. 

 Cornbread has seen his share of heartbreak in his personal life. Orphaned at the age of three, he was raised in several foster homes before living with his grandparents. Four of Cornbread’s marriages have ended in divorce. Cornbread is the father of one of the architects of the “Minneapolis Sound,” the songwriter and producer Jimmy Jam. Cornbread and Jimmy performed together when Jimmy was a teenager, but after Cornbread and Jimmy’s mom got divorced Cornbread and Jimmy were estranged for many years.  

Deeper Blues examines Cornbread’s past, but it also tells the story of the present day. As Cornbread and Andrea are having weekly discussions about his life, Cornbread is also starting to reconnect with Jimmy. Andrea is able to connect Cornbread and Jimmy through Zoom calls, and she observes the two men reestablish their relationship. It doesn’t feel like a spoiler to mention that the emotional highlight of the story is when Jimmy joins Cornbread on stage in Minneapolis for Cornbread’s 95th birthday concert.  

Cornbread has a sunny disposition, and his mantra is: “I am a blessed dude.” (p.9) He also tells Andrea: “All of my hardships ended up to be blessings.” (p.3) What a wonderful way to look at the world. Swensson has crafted a rich and vibrant portrait of Cornbread: piano player, songwriter, singer, entertainer, a truly remarkable musician and person.  

One of my favorites quotes in the book is from Jimmy Jam: “People don’t remember the details of stuff. But what they do remember is how you made them feel.” (p.186) That is very true, and it’s a quote that I remember hearing for the first time when I was in school to get my teaching license. I tried my best to always make my students feel welcomed and respected.  

Deeper Blues is about music, love, and the connection between a father and a son, with the uplifting message that it’s never too late to forge a new connection. It’s a beautiful message, and you will be blessed by spending some time with Cornbread and Jimmy.  

Book Review: The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, edited by C. Hugh Holman (1961)

My copy of The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, 1961. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Thomas Wolfe is best known for his four long novels, but he also published many short stories and several short novels during his brief career. The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, edited by C. Hugh Holman, and published in 1961, shines more light on these neglected pieces of writing.  

Five short novels, originally published in magazines, are included in the book: A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, The Web of Earth, No Door, “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” and The Party at Jack’s. Things get a little confusing because Wolfe incorporated the material from the first three short novels into his second novel Of Time and the River. After Wolfe’s death in 1938, his editor Edward C. Aswell incorporated the material from the last two short novels into the 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Holman does the reader a service by reprinting these short novels as they appeared in magazines during the 1930’s, showing us how readers at the time would have encountered these texts. Part of Holman’s purpose was to demonstrate to the reader how Wolfe edited and shaped his writing, and that Wolfe was capable of writing fiction outside of the context of his long, autobiographical novels.  

Wolfe’s skill at creating shorter works of fiction is evident from these five short novels. The Web of Earth is especially impressive, as Wolfe channels the voice of his mother, Julia Wolfe, and the story unspools largely as a monologue. It’s a masterful performance, and shows Wolfe’s control of his material, as the old woman moves backwards and forwards in time as she embarks on diversions from her main narrative. The way Wolfe captures her speech patterns is fantastic. 

No Door is a beautiful and sad portrait of loneliness and isolation, as Wolfe takes the reader through several different Octobers in his life, and explores his yearning for human connection. Wolfe is searching for the door—the escape, the connection to others—but he can’t find it. 

There’s a wonderful paragraph describing New York City at the beginning of No Door that is a fantastic example of Wolfe’s style: 

“Evening is coming fast, and the tall frosted glasses in your hands make a thin but pleasant tinkling, and the great city is blazing there in your vision in its terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers, now sown with the diamond pollen of a million lights, and the sun has set behind them, and the red light of fading day is painted upon the river—and you see the boats, the tugs, the barges passing, and the winglike swoop of bridges with exultant joy—and night has come, and there are ships there—there are ships—and a wild intolerable longing in you that you cannot utter.” (p.160)  

Wolfe’s exuberant prose paints such a vivid picture of the city for the reader. Another one of my favorite passages in No Door is one in which Wolfe describes working men eating: 

“They ate with bestial concentration, grained to the teeth with coarse spicy meat, coating their sandwiched hamburgers with the liberal unction of the thick tomato ketchup, and rending with hard blackened fingers soft yielding slabs of fragrant baker’s bread.” (p.224)  

I love the phrase “liberal unction of the thick tomato ketchup,” it’s just such a wonderful and unlikely combination.  

A Portrait of Bascome Hawke isn’t really about loneliness, but it has an interesting quote related to it. Wolfe writes of the title character, “Like all of us he had no home.” (p.22) Much of Wolfe’s writing is about people searching for home, looking for human connections. 

Although Wolfe was from North Carolina, he showed in this passage that he understood spring in the north: “It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late, with a magical northern suddenness. It seemed to have burst out of the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.” (p.49) I’ve definitely experienced days like that.  

“I Have a Thing to Tell You” is a fascinating story. Wolfe had visited Germany several times in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and he felt a deep love and admiration for the country. When Of Time and the River was published in a German translation in 1935, Wolfe became a literary celebrity in Germany. Wolfe visited Germany again during the summer of 1936, and this visit finally soured him on the Nazi government. Wolfe was no fascist, but like other Western visitors to Germany between 1933 and 1938, he saw what Nazi propaganda intended for him to see—that things in Germany were looking up. In 1936, Wolfe attended a reception for Charles Lindbergh in Berlin, and I wish I knew what these two men thought of each other. The events detailed in “I Have a Thing to Tell You” happened to Wolfe—he was riding a train from Berlin to Paris, and one of the passengers in his compartment was a Jew who was trying to get out of Germany. When the train stopped at the Belgian border, the man was detained by the Germans, who found that he was trying to smuggle money out of Germany. At that time, only 10 Marks could be taken out of Germany—Wolfe had to spend all of his German royalties before he left the country. Wolfe felt a sense of helpless indignation and rage at the plight of this Jewish man, and he realized the cold brutality of the Nazi government. In the story as the Jewish man is being taken off the train, Wolfe wrote: “All of a sudden, without knowing why, I felt myself trembling with a murderous and incomprehensible anger...I felt impotent, shackled, unable to stir against the walls of an obscene but unshakable authority.” (p.270)  

Wolfe knew that if he published this story, he would be persona non grata in Germany—he would be shutting the door on a place where he was celebrated. To Wolfe’s credit, he published “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” because he knew it was the right thing to do. It is a powerful story and has a strong narrative drive. 

In the story, Wolfe perfectly describes receiving a wake-up call from the front desk of the hotel: “I stirred, then roused sharply, from that fitful and uneasy sleep which a man experiences when he has gone to bed late knowing he has got to get up early.” (p.236)  

Wolfe has his German publisher acerbically describe literary fame: “But then, I notice, in America they love everyone a year—and then they spit upon him.” (p.247) By 1937, when “I Have a Thing to Tell You” was published, Wolfe had experienced both critical acclaim and critical revulsion firsthand, and I found that line to be quite funny, and also accurate.  

The Party at Jack’s is a bit of a let-down after “I Have a Thing to Tell You” but it also presents us with Wolfe’s growing social concerns. In it, Wolfe describes a party at a fancy New York City apartment building on Park Avenue. (Specifically, the Hotel Marguery, now the site of the JP Morgan Chase building.) The Hotel Marguery was built above railroad tracks that led to Grand Central Terminal, and Wolfe describes the people who live in the apartment feeling the vibrations of the trains passing underneath. This becomes a vivid symbol of the working class rumbling underneath the wealthy above them. It’s also a symbol of the building being built literally over, or on the backs of, the lower class. Wolfe casts his net wide in the story, giving the reader little portraits of many different characters. The sculptor Alexander Calder shows up as “Piggy Hartwell” in the story, performing his circus act with tiny wire figures of his own creation. Wolfe was not impressed with Calder’s act, and according to the story, neither were most of the guests at the party. Maybe Calder’s mobiles would have been more to Wolfe’s taste? 

The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe has been out of print for years. That’s unfortunate, because it gives readers a chance to see Wolfe’s mastery of the short novel, or novella, format, and it also affords us the opportunity to see how his work was presented in magazines during his lifetime.