Mardi Gras weekend w/ Betty Harris, Peterson Brothers

Betty Harris kicks off Mardi Gras with an encore performance of last year’s two-night stand at Antone’s. Nicknamed the Lost Queen of New Orleans Soul and associated with late producer-pianist Allen Toussaint, you’d be forgiven for thinking the 80-year-old diva hails from the Big Easy.

“Oh, no,” she clarified by phone from her home in Connecticut last year. “I was in New Orleans about a month, but that’s the longest I’ve ever been there.”

Harris grew up in Florida and Alabama surrounded by music, her father promoting gospel artists including Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Dixie Hummingbirds, and Caravans. She considers herself most fortunate to have spent a good amount of time around Tharpe, “who was actually playing rock & roll but nobody knew it!” Another giant of the genre mentored Harris after she moved to NYC in the early Sixties.

“I had such a huge set of lungs that I really didn’t know where I belonged until I met Big Maybelle,” she said. “I went to her when she was playing the Apollo and she helped me find my own style, my own voice, my own sound.”

Harris cracked the R&B Top 10 in 1963 with a syrupy slow take on Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.” The second half of the decade found her jetting to New Orleans for sessions with Toussaint and a rhythm section that soon became the Meters. The sessions proved tumultuous but the results – searing ballads (“Nearer to You”) and furious funk (“There’s a Break in the Road”) – remain thrilling to this day.

“Allen was young, I was young. We clashed some, but I had a definite respect for his work. There was some childish stuff, but along with the Meters, we came out with some gorgeous songs.”

– Thomas Fawcett