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Katrina Orphan: Jazz, funk singer, writer finds home and new life in N.C.
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Leigh Harris, at home in Rural Hall, talks about her life and how she has dealt with the shock of losing the New Orleans she once knew.
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Published: October 19, 2009
Leigh Harris left her native New Orleans four years ago, after Hurricane Katrina swept through.
The house she lived in suffered only minor damage, but the sight of her city and its people, so devastated by the storm, left her with deep emotional scars.
Harris had developed quite a following on the New Orleans music scene, most notably as lead singer of Little Queenie and The Percolators in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The group's signature song was "My Darling New Orleans." And she performed on stage with musical legends such as B.B. King, Sun Ra and Elvis Costello.
Harris was a feisty singer with close-cropped hair and a voice that could seduce or scream.
Then the hurricane came and sucked her dry.
"I just felt like a husk," she said.
Shell-shocked, she packed up her things and left New Orleans, finally settling in a house in Rural Hall. At first, she stayed cooped up for months.
But she has started to emerge. And on Friday, she will make her Winston-Salem debut, performing from 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., as part of a benefit for Habitat for Humanity's ReStore at 341 Witt St.
Singing is something she has to do.
"I never really felt I had a choice," Harris said. "It was just, you know, what I was born to do."
Katrina coming
It was the weekend of Aug. 27, 2005, and Harris was headed to Austin, Texas.
She was just about finished with her CD, Purple Heart, a compilation of New Orleans roots music.
She wanted to meet with a friend who owned a club in Austin to plan a CD release party.
Harris stopped off in Houston to see her sister. It was there that she first heard about Hurricane Katrina.
Harris grew up in Old Metairie, just outside of New Orleans, so she was used to storms. When she was a child, a storm knocked out power for 10 days.
She wasn't worried about Hurricane Katrina.
Then the levees broke, and before all was said and done, the storm had done more than $80 billion in damage. More than 1,800 people died. She heard horrific stories, including one about a woman dying of thirst.
Those next few weeks were a whirlwind.
She stayed in Austin, where she had plenty of friends, then flew to New York where she performed at a Hurricane Katrina benefit.
That's when the emotions started to hit her. She realized that she had lost her sense of home.
"It was the first time I really felt completely rootless," she said. "I didn't live anywhere."
Soon after, she got a call from a friend who lived in Rural Hall. The friend was going away for a while and asked Harris if she wanted to house-sit. She stayed for about two weeks and then moved into a hotel in Winston-Salem.
Around that time, she found the house in Rural Hall that she eventually bought.
Harris made her first trip back to Louisiana a couple of months after Hurricane Katrina hit. She traveled to Lafayette to rerecord "My Darling New Orleans," and then went to her house in New Orleans to pack up her belongings.
She knew she couldn't stay there.
"I couldn't do anything but put my head down and go forward," she said.
Picks up nickname
But moving forward was harder than she thought.
She would perform gigs here and there, but she wasn't looking for work, she said.
Mostly, she stayed in her house.
But that didn't feel right.
Harris grew up in Old Metairie surrounded by music. Her father was a musician, and she heard classical music, jazz, rock 'n' roll and folk. She memorized the Broadway tunes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and adored the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
She was singing by the time she was a year old. She picked up a guitar when she was a teenager and started singing her songs around New Orleans.
In the late 1970s, she hooked up with John Magnie, a keyboardist from Colorado, and formed Little Queenie and The Percolators. She got the name Little Queenie from her then-boyfriend. She hated the name but then she heard the Chuck Berry song of the same name.
The name fit her, she thought, since she was a short, sassy girl.
She lost the boyfriend but kept the name.
Harris was a rarity, a white woman singing jazz and funk music, wowing audiences with her powerful vocals. After Little Queenie and The Percolators disbanded in 1982, she continued performing with Magnie and other singers and bands.
Peter Holsapple, a Winston-Salem native and a member of the '80s pop rock group The dB's, played guitar in Harris' band, Mixed Knots, in the 1990s.
"She is so highly regarded as a singer and a spiritual figurehead," he said. "She's able to gather people from all walks of life. She's gotten to draw in the finest talent New Orleans has to offer, not to mention the rest of the world."
Return to music
Harris began to move back into music slowly. Rick Ledbetter, an old friend who had moved to Virginia, e-mailed her to see how she was doing.
And then he asked her to come to Virginia so she could hang out with some of his musician friends. She reluctantly agreed to go for two days.
Then they fell in love and got married, and Harris ended up staying in Virginia for a year. She and Ledbetter moved back to North Carolina in 2007, but Harris still couldn't move beyond her depression.
Then this year, she visited an energy healer. During one session, she said she felt the spirits of her grandmother and Odetta, the folk singer who died in late 2008.
And it finally clicked that she had been holding all her pain inside, not putting it into her music.
"I'm not writing," she said. "I'm not on a bandstand wailing at people."
Harris went back home and put up a profile on Facebook. She was contacted by Winston-Salem singer-songwriter Britt Uzzell, who introduced her to his musician friends.
And she began coming out of her seclusion.
She started writing again and performing more regularly.
Harris now goes back to New Orleans several times a year. Her son, Alex MacDonald, 25, left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina but has since moved back, playing with his band, Dwayne Dopsie and the Zydeco Hellraisers. And many of her New Orleans musician friends have moved back as well.
But Harris has put down her roots here.
She has managed, though, to bring a little New Orleans with her.
She's strung up multi-colored Mardi Gras beads. Her living room contains a shrine to Oshun, Erzulie and Chango, spiritual figures in New Orleans' voodoo culture.
Harris says she can't get over her sense that local, state and federal officials failed to do all they could for New Orleans. Plus, she hates the weather, the politics and the crime in New Orleans.
Harris said she has grown to love North Carolina.
But she still misses the people of New Orleans.
"I miss them so much my fingertips ache because I want to grab them and hug them," she said.
mhewlett@wsjournal.com
727-7326
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