Leigh Harris — Little Queenie — was one of New Orleans' most beloved club singers, a raw, elastic voice that moved between soul, blues and jazz and made her a fixture at Tipitina's, the Maple Leaf and Jazz Fest for four decades. She was born July 27, 1954, and the city still marks that date every year as Little Queenie Day.
Biography
Harris was born on July 27, 1954, in New Orleans, the eldest of three daughters of Allan Joseph Harris Jr., a clarinetist with a soft spot for big band and Dixieland, and Gertrude Morris Middleton Harris, founder of the Little School in Metairie. She was writing songs as a girl in Old Metairie and made her public debut at eleven, singing and playing guitar at a Tulane University hootenanny broadcast campus-wide by WTUL. After high school she worked the New Orleans folk circuit as, in her husband's words, "the girl on a stool with an acoustic guitar," playing French Quarter bars — it was there she met keyboardist John Magnie, and the two started writing and singing together. The name that would follow her for the rest of her life came not long after: a boyfriend called her "Little Queenie" to needle her, she decided she liked it, and on April Fool's Day 1975 she debuted under it at Jed's Bar on Oak Street.
When Tipitina's opened in January 1977, Harris joined guitarist John Mooney's Back Door Blues Revue as a vocalist. She and Magnie soon landed the club's Monday-night piano-duet slot, and the two decided to build a band around it: Li'l Queenie and the Percolators, a group that fused Harris's voice with funk, R&B and jazz and shared stages and studios with James Booker, Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers, Dr. John and Irma Thomas. When the group played New York's Kenny's Castaways in March 1980, New York Times critic John Rockwell wrote that "Miss Harris has more voice, personality and stage presence than any other young performer this observer has encountered in a long, long time" — a rare national notice for a New Orleans club act. The band's calling card, "My Darlin' New Orleans," began as a poem performed by the Jazz Poetry Group, which counted both Harris and Magnie as members: poet Ron Cuccia wrote the words, bassist Ramsey MacLean wrote the music, and Magnie arranged the piano part. Harris and Magnie carried the song over to the Percolators, who added its instrumental intro, and it became the band's signature single. Cuccia later wrote a second piece — a spoken-word passage about the streets of the Quarter — which was folded in as an introduction and recorded in that form for 2018's Purple Heart.
Harris spent the decades that followed leading and singing in a run of idiosyncratic outfits — the Skin Twins, the Boys of Joy, Little Queenie and the Rhythm and Blues Death Squad, Roy G Biv, the Red Beans and Rice Review, and the Ofay Soul Choir (also billed as Little Queenie's Wahini Dakinis) — and appeared on record or onstage with B.B. King, Elvis Costello, Harry Connick Jr., Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Taj Mahal, Pete Seeger and dozens of others. Director John Sayles cast her in two films: she sang "After You've Gone" and "I Be Blue" in Eight Men Out, and played the role of Kit in Passion Fish. She later appeared on Treme performing her own "10 Carat Blues" with pianist Josh Paxton. Harris released three studio albums in her lifetime — House of Secrets (1999), Polychrome Junction (2006) and Purple Heart (2018), the last recorded years earlier and released as a benefit to help cover her medical costs — and in 2000 was named Female Performer of the Year by Gambit Entertainment Weekly.
Harris was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in 2016 and did not perform or record again. She spent her final years at "Harmony Hill," the North Carolina home she shared with her husband, bassist Rick Ledbetter, after relocating there when Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans house. In 2019 she was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, and that July the New Orleans City Council proclaimed her birthday, July 27, "Little Queenie Day" — an honor her son, musician Alex Harris MacDonald, accepted on her behalf. She died at home on September 21, 2019, at 65, with Ledbetter by her side. Since then, Ledbetter has pieced together and released a run of archival recordings — the 2020 EP Waking Up in Dreamland, for one, combines a rhythm section and lead vocals recorded in Raleigh with backing vocals recorded in Algiers and a guitar overdub Jimmy Robinson recorded remotely and emailed back, all mixed and produced at "Harmony Hill Studios".
Discography
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