Jaimee Harris: Falling, Falling Into Place
Waco singer-songwriter "felt like I'd stepped into this world of creativity" in Austin
LISTEN: A Jaimee Harris playlist
The first voice to give me chicken skin this year belongs to a 33-year-old Waco native who did nine years in Austin clubs (2009-2018) without much recognition except the respect of her peers. The song was “How Can You Be Gone” and the singer with that extra gear was Jaimee Harris.
Harris was playing guitar and singing harmony with Mary Gauthier on the Outlaw Country Cruise last month, wearing the custom Fort Lonesome suit of a headliner. Midway through the set, “Go-shay,” as Mary’s surname is pronounced, let her significant other Harris take a lead on a song they co-wrote after their healthy friend Betsy died out of the blue from a tick bite while on a hike. Mirroring the experience of relentless grief, Jaimee’s voice built with intensity until she was wailing to the heavens, unleashed. Wow!
“How Can You Be Gone” was also inspired by the passing of Jimmy LaFave, a major mentor in Harris’s career, who succumbed to cancer in 2017. She came recommended as a backup singer for his Night Tribe (2015) album, and LaFave recognized something special, eventually asking Jaimee to help him set an unpublished Woody Guthrie poem to music. That’s about the highest compliment the hardcore Woodyphile could give to a fellow musician, but illness got in the way of the collaboration. “There are moments when things are really difficult in my life and I want to call him and he's not here,” Harris told an interviewer last year. “I shake my fist at the sky and go like, how could you be gone?”
Harris really needed to talk to LaFave in late 2018, when she was on her first-ever solo acoustic tour in Europe with Gauthier. “I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon,” recalls Harris, who always fronted a band or sang harmony in Austin. Opening for a masterful singer-songwriter, who’s taken audiences into her dark, yet hopeful world of songs for more than 30 years, Jaimee felt naked, vulnerable, and fumbled song introductions. Even the now-trademark red heart glasses she bought for eight dollars at Blue Velvet on North Loop couldn’t hide her fear-in-the-headlights look. “I bombed,” she says. “Every single night.”
Her therapist, alarmed by the spike in anxiety, suggested Jaimee maybe check in someplace for a few days, you know, just to slow everything down. Instead, she got six months at home in Nashville with Gauthier. Harris was one of the few musicians who actually benefited from the Covid-19 lockdown. “It was a blessing in disguise,” she said via phone from Comfort, TX, where she was on a songwriting retreat hosted by Gauthier.
Besides getting her off that brutal road, the pandemic gave Harris the time to reflect on her songs and her life, and how she could better intersect them onstage. Her friend Ray Wylie Hubbard had shown there’s no shame in honing banter, and now Jaimee had time to figure it out. She got comfortable with the idea of herself as a folk singer and not a band leader. And she got a whole lot of songwriting advice from Gauthier, a Baton Rouge native who rose to prominence on the international folk scene after the 2002 release of Filth & Fire, produced in Austin by Gurf Morlix. They met in July 2017, became a couple in April 2018, then started living together the next year.
Though 28 years Jaimee’s senior, Gauthier didn’t write her first song until 1995, the same year a five-year-old Harris formed her first chord on an acoustic guitar. They’re not only the same age in music, but share the addiction/sobriety journey. On her solo set at the OCC8, Jaimee proudly announced she’d received her 10-year chip just the day before. (The cruise has a daily “Friends of Bill W” meeting, which helps recovering alcoholics stay sober in that party atmosphere, but was a bummer one morning for a couple Bill Withers fans.) In the audience were her parents, and onstage was her electric guitarist brother Robby, who played low-volume psychedelic soundtrack music that somehow fit his sister’s songs of longing.
The Jaimee Harris of the failed 2018 tour is long gone. The voice is the voice, pristine and powerful, that she’s always had, but the song introductions were also charming and poignant. The audience in the packed Spinnaker Lounge may not have known of Harris aside from her connection to Gauthier, but they were clearly on her side, laughing at all her jokey asides, wildly-applauding the radio-friendly “Love Is Gonna Come Again,” a cowrite with Graham Weber, then becoming pin-drop quiet on “Fall (Devin’s Song),” about a sixth grade classmate who died in a accidental shooting. It’s set on the day Devin would’ve graduated from high school.
We should be packing you up for college
'Cause you had big dreams, far bigger than this town
That song’s from Boomerang Town, Jaimee’s latest album, produced by Mark Hallman, about escaping a dead end hometown existence. Harris bolted out of the Waco suburb of Hewitt at age 19, but you can’t say she never looked back. Songs are just a way to make sense of something you didn’t understand when it was happening- in three verses, a chorus, and maybe a bridge.
The Boomerang effect is when dreams are revealed to be delusions, calling for a move back home made more challenging by the tail between your legs. Jaimee was terrified of that prospect when she chose Austin after half a year at Colorado State and a semester at Walmart. She was lost until she found herself as part of the Austin music scene. Her introduction was singing backup for David Ramirez, then she started hustling gigs at the One-2-One club on South Lamar. “I felt like I’d stepped into a world of creativity,” she said of those around her focused on their art.
All that freedom in Austin was initially underlined and undermined by cocaine and alcohol abuse, which Jaimee had avoided in high school, where her drug of choice was fast food. After her second DWI, the judge made a 23-year-old Harris pick prison or rehab, which is the opposite of Sophie’s choice.
As luck would have it, Jaimee’s newfound sobriety coincided with the opening of Strange Brew, a 24-hour coffee shop off Ben White with a 150-capacity listening room. For five years- 2012- 2017- the Brew cultivated quite a scene for singer-songwriters, and Jaimee was both sponge and starfish. It’s where she debuted the confessional “Snow White Knuckles,” a rock bottom reminder which turned heads: the voice could write!
Much of her ride-or-die girl gang/support group- including Seela, BettySoo, Noelle Hampton, Jane Ellen Bryant and Bonnie Whitmore- came from those Strange days. “I consider myself very lucky to have her as my bestie,” says Whitmore, whose Thursday Zoom meetups during the pandemic kept Jaimee connected. “She’s multitalented and a really good human. I’d be jealous if I didn’t love her as much as I do.”
Besides getting sober, Harris had shed 175 pounds through the years with healthy choices and exercise. At her peak she weighed 300 lbs! When you’re chubby in school you’re invisible, except to bullies. But a nine-year-old Harris suddenly was noticed at elementary school in Grapevine, TX when she played guitar behind a trio of popular girls singing the Dixie Chicks. “I overhead them saying they wanted to sing ‘Wide Open Spaces’ at the school talent show, but couldn’t find anyone to play guitar.” I can play that, Harris spoke up, and she backed them to great crowd response. From then on, she was the chick who could really play the guitar. She had found her identity, and, perhaps, something to hide behind.
It’s always been music music music for the Harris family, whose father Chris is a guitarist/singer moonlighting as a Waco attorney. Jaimee’s parents had her when they were 20 and in college, so she was also raised by her maternal grandparents until her grandfather, an alcoholic, committed suicide when she was five. That was the year she asked for a flying horse for Christmas and instead got the wood and wires that would give her flight.
Jaimee’s career path was set the first time she heard music as magic on an Emmylou Harris Christmas album. She played title track “Light of the Stable” over and over again until it became part of her DNA. Her next obsession was the 1997 live LP by Fleetwood Mac called The Dance. “I wanted to be Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham,” she says.
Her father took her to the first Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2002, where she saw Emmylou Harris in the flesh, and also her new favorite singer Patty Griffin. She went back to Waco with the goal to one day sing on that stage. Jaimee started doing guest appearances with her father’s cover band and, at 14, she started writing songs and traveled the Texas LGBV (little girl big voice) circuit that also spawned Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert and Maren Morris. Harris was once on the same bill as Morris, also from the DFW suburbs. “You could see she was going to be a superstar, playing arenas,” says Harris. “But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I saw myself as more of a folk singer.”
The deciding factor of choosing Austin over Dallas (the Waco conundrum) was being able to see James McMurtry twice a week for under ten dollars. Harris’s musical tastes do not follow the gay stereotype. “My joke was ‘where are the lesbians who are into Guy Clark?’” Harris says, with a laugh. “And I ended up with the lesbian who opened for Guy Clark.”
When I interviewed Gauthier in 2002, she was indeed on tour with the man who wrote “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” She compared songwriting to doing an emotional jigsaw puzzle. “When I’m writing I’m desperate,” she said. “I mean, I have to play my songs in a hotel room with Guy Clark sitting there. If you can’t get Guy to slap a knee, you can forget about that song.”
Jaimee Harris can probably identify. Though Gauthier is best known in the mainstream for “I Drink,” covered by Blake Shelton in 2004, her body of work can be intimidating to a developing artist.
“Probably the main thing I’ve learned from Mary is how to edit,” Harris says. “Take out what you don’t need to tell the story.” (Oh, boy. Now I want to go back and cut that Bill Withers line.)
What she learned from producer Craig Ross, the layermeister who helmed the exceptional 2018 debut LP Red Rescue, is to do more, even when you think you’re done. Harris and Ross tracked 16 well-produced songs, of which 10 would make the album, but Ross called for one more. Jaimee didn’t understand. Didn’t they already have too many? But what the producer, fresh off three Patty Griffin albums, felt lacking was a track that gave Jaimee a new way to sing.
With Ross writing the music to “Forever,” and Harris adding the lyrics, it’s an astonishing vocal showcase that sounds nothing like the others. When that was done, Ross said now we need an album closer. With less resistance this time, Harris wrote “Where Are You Now,” a gorgeous dirge inspired by the death of her grandmother. She earned her Townes Van Zandt tattoo on that one, which touches on dementia. The brilliant last track on Red Rescue puts its arms around Jaimee’s years in Austin, and sets her off on a journey just beginning.
Austin raised Jaimee, but Nashville’s where her heroes live. It’s where she got to sing the song that changed her life, with the fantasy aunt who recorded it. “It was at the Room at the Inn benefit in Nashville, and when I got there and saw on the set list that Emmylou Harris was gonna do ‘Light of the Stable,” I just started crying,” Jaimee recalls. Maybe the word got to Emmylou because she asked if Jaimee wanted to sing it with her. A rehearsal was cut short when it became apparent Jaimee knew the song as well as Emmylou. That night’s performance was an out-of-body experience for the superfan.
Having recorded both her albums here, Jaimee Harris is still an Austin musician at heart, and she’s coming home for most of March. First, she’s playing the Townes Van Zandt birthday tribute at the Rollins Theater March 6, then she’ll be running all over town during South by Southwest. Jaimee’s official showcase on Wednesday March 13 (9 p.m.) at the Saxon Pub is a reunion of her old Austin band, with former roommate Jane Ellen Bryant on backing vocals. If I were you, I’d go early and pay cover if you have to. The life is catching up to the voice, and it’s a wonderful thing to behold.
This is the third part of my series on Austin artists who made big splashes on the recent Outlaw Country Cruise. Previously:
Next up: Jesse Dayton
I first saw Jamiee at Strange Brew during Kacy’s open mic night.
she blew everyone away. Love her voice.
Loved watching Jaimee and Mary's livestreams every Sunday during the pandemic. Great to read more about her! 🌟