The Divine Life of Charles Jacob Harris

Augusta has produced many fine musicians over the years, but one of the most interesting is not as well known today as he deserves to be, not only for his musical accomplishments but also for his remarkable life.

Born on July 2, 1885, Charles Jacob Harris grew up in Summerville, where his parents were servants of some of Augusta’s elite white families. His musically talented mother Elizabeth Johnson Harris encouraged young Charles. She had been an organist for the African American Sunday School at the Church of the Good Shepherd and Charles served for a time as the pump boy for the church’s organ. According to Charles, his mother had a “fine carrying soprano voice.” Young Charles performed beginning at just seven years old in the concerts and “theatricals” his mother presented at least twice a year.

When she was growing up, her grandfather, Peter Stewart, had purchased a small three-octave organ for the family and Elizabeth began his lessons on that instrument. When Charles was 13, his mother bought a $200 piano, which the family paid off at $5 per month. His father, Jacob, earned about $20 per month as a servant and his mother supplemented the household income with her skills as a seamstress—a clear demonstration of the value of music and commitment to the development of the children’s talents by those parents. Charles did not waste the opportunity, practicing for up to five hours a day. “I dreamed of the day that I should pull ethereal like tones from the piano,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Young Harris began his formal education at the age of six in the still young public school system of Richmond County. From the beginning schools were segregated, even before segregation had become entrenched in other aspects of public life, so Charles and his siblings attended the black grammar school eventually named Weed School, in honor of the Reverend Edwin Weed, rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, whom Charles’s mother admired greatly. Because his family was too poor to buy textbooks, which were not furnished to students until well into the 20th century, Charles went to school early, helped build the fires in the winter and studied the books in the classroom before the school day began. Seven years later, when Elizabeth Harris felt that her bright son had learned as much as the school had to offer, she transferred him to Paine Institute, a trolley ride down the Hill. By that time, the only public high school for blacks had been closed. At Paine he was able to study with music professor Charles Dryscoll, well-known throughout the area as a fine teacher and musician. Charles stayed at Paine until he completed the “normal” course.

Throughout his schools days, the diligent Charles worked. His first job in Augusta at age nine was taking care of the two white boys who lived next door, sons of an Augusta druggist and his wife. While a teenager he earned income playing organ at his church (15 to 25 cents per month) and sometimes caddying at the Augusta Country Club.

In 1904 he began further education at Atlanta University, the alma mater of several leading African Americans in Augusta, including Lucy Craft Laney. While he both studied and taught music during his two years in Atlanta, Charles also reveled in the large choirs of the churches and associated himself with talented musicians. He was surprised when one of his professors asked him to try out for the college quartet; Charles considered himself a pianist rather than singer. The voice lessons he had taken at Paine were more “to build musicianship” than to become a vocalist. He said that as he practiced for the audition, he was so nervous that he sounded like a “hog caller.” “I hollered high F’s and G’s right and left until I am sure there would not have been any need for a siren should a fire have broken out...so ‘kerblip’ went my first opportunity as a vocalist.” Harris would eventually develop his voice, in spite of that questionable first effort.

His time in Atlanta was a period of growth and refinement. He heard his first “world-famed artist,” Eugene Ysaye, the great Belgian violinist, saying the performance “electrified me...He made the violin cry, moan and literally shout, ‘til it appeared a soul from a lost world had arisen to tell this world a thing or two.”

Charles took the inspiration with him to Boston where, like many young African Americans from the South, he found work as a bellman. This sustained him as he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. Whenever possible, he attended the concerts of the Boston Symphony, the Handel and Haydn Society as well as performances of touring artists including Paderewski and Copeland, Caruso and Anderson. In his memoirs he would list them and write soulfully of specific performances that moved and inspired him.

In Boston, sometime around 1911 or 1912, Harris became friends with tenor Roland Hayes. For several years Harris was Hayes’s accompanist and Hayes gave Harris voice lessons. By the 1920s Hayes had become the first African American tenor of world renown. Fortunately for Augustans, Harris brought Hayes to Augusta on several occasions. In her memoirs, Charles’s mother Elizabeth remembered with pride that she had hosted Hayes in her home. In a 1914 visit, the two spent a week giving concerts at Haines School, the Partridge Inn, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Cumming Grove Baptist Church, Tabernacle Baptist Church and in the home of George Stearns, president of Riverside Mill. The Tabernacle audience, she noted, was “white and colored, home folks and tourists.” When the two visited in 1915, she wrote: “How I would enjoy the rich sweet music, morning and evening in such classical lines, in my own home from the rich cultured voice of Mr. Hayes with my son Mr. Harris at the piano.”

After 12 years in Boston, Charles decided to return to the South. When a fellow student at the New England Conservatory had spoken negatively of the South, Charles defended his homeland and said “too many illustrious men had come from Dixie to warrant such a narrow view...Men like Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosemond Johnson and William Grant Still never disowned the land of their nativity.” Harris spent the rest of his life in the South, teaching at several African American colleges. From 1918 to 1920, he served as head of the music department at his hometown alma mater Paine College. During the second year of the U.S. involvement in World War I and at the request of Good Shepherd Church, he agreed to entertain the soldiers stationed at Camp Hancock once a week at chapel. He also received many invitations to play at white homes during that period—more than he could accommodate, according to his mother.

His reputation in his hometown was cemented and from that time on, he drew large audiences when performing in Augusta. The Augusta Chronicle announced a February 1927 concert at the parish hall of the Good Shepherd Church on its front page, saying “music lovers of the community have a treat in store in the recital which will be given...by Charles Harris, the noted colored tenor-pianist...a singer and pianist of high merit.” When he played again in Augusta in 1935, the Sunday paper called him “one of the leading musicians in the East...his talent has been praised in the North and South where he has played to large crowds.” Indeed, an audience in Colorado Springs had numbered five to six thousand. His programs included works by Chopin, Beethoven, Schubert, Purcell, Rachmaninoff and other great classical composers.

While teaching at Paine, he met Eleta Atwater, who became his wife in 1922. Their home base became Durham, Atwater‘s hometown, but Charles did not live there full time until his first retirement in 1951. In the 1920s he taught at several colleges. In the early 1930s he went to the Chicago School of Music for a degree. He won a competition to sing at his graduation, where he performed a selection from Gounod’s Faust. Over the next 20 years he continued his work as a college music professor, spending 17 of those years at South Carolina State University. During that time his family grew with the births of three children— Mamye Elizabeth, John Henry and Eleta Jean—who inherited their family’s musical ability. While Charles was mainly a classical musician, son John Henry became a professional jazz musician, accompanying such greats as Billie Holliday and Dinah Washington.

When Charles Harris retired at the age of 66, he still had almost four decades of active life ahead of him. He taught at North Carolina Central for an additional 12 years and continued to play piano for churches, at a senior citizens’ organization and other groups. He worked with the blind in Durham and did volunteer work through the Retired Volunteers in Service program. He returned to his hometown for a concert in 1975 at age 90 and again in 1978. By then he had added ragtime to his repertoire, including the “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin, whom he had met in Boston. His concert a month later at South Carolina State, however, reflected his continuing love of classical music with selections of Debussey, Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Saint-Saens and Verdi. The reviewer wrote that “scales and arpeggios pose no problem for the nimble 93 year old.” Seven years later he was still playing—at his 100th birthday party.

When asked in 1978 by a reporter for the Augusta Herald about his secret to good health, his answer showed that he was way ahead of his time. In his 20s, according to Harris, while on the road from concert to concert, especially when he was accompanying Roland Hayes, he had problems with indigestion, insomnia and other health issues. He became interested in healthy living and began reading everything he could find. He ultimately came to believe in natural foods with no additives, pesticides, hormones, food that was grown in healthy soil.

He avoided canned foods, white bread and rice, cow’s milk and sugar. His main diet came to consist of fresh organic vegetables, the darkest he could find, lots of fresh fruits, prunes and his favorite dish—beans. He believed that many of his friends and associates had “eaten their way into cemeteries.” In his writings, he also advocated a brisk walk in the open air for one hour each day and light calisthenics for five minutes every morning. Six daily glasses of water and an abundance of sleep rounded out the list. He had been adhering to this program for more than 60 years. In the 1970s and ’80s when Duke University conducted a study of the “Old-Old,” Charles Harris was one of the participants.

In July 1988, a couple of weeks after his 103rd birthday, Charles Harris died. His life had been filled with devotion to his work, love and care for family, wide travels, healthful habits, volunteer service to others and love of music. Music underlay it all, providing not only his passion but his moral underpinning. “One must shy away from selfishness, bigotry, and all things of the sordid if they expect to make real music. Music is meant to convey a message of the most exalted standards. One cannot live a slipshod existence and then expect to play an instrument with a beauty akin to the Divine.” Throughout his long and well-lived life, Charles Harris strived to make music that was akin to the Divine.