At age 9, Jimmy Lee Harris learned to play his first instrument, which he called the ‘mouthbow’. “I would get me a good strong green stick, and put a piece of nylon string in it, get it real tight and put it in my mouth and pluck it,” Harris explained.

Born March 1, 1935, in Seal, Alabama, Harris spent his childhood working in the fields around Phoenix City and assisting his father making moonshine. At 17 Harris left home to ramble, working a range of jobs across the country: he roofed in Tampa; drove railroad spikes in Sacramento; shrimped in Key West; served as a maintenance man at Dodge in Detroit; he laboured at pulpwood mills in Florida and Alabama and as a cement block worker in Georgia.

For all his traveling Harris frequently drifted back to Phoenix City, where Mitchell found him in 1981. With his older brother Eddie, Jimmy Lee played local rent parties, where the host served liquor and food to pay the rent. Much of the duo’s repertoire, including ‘Sitting Here Looking A 1000 Miles Away’, was traditional to the Lower Chattahoochee Valley region.

The brothers claim the biggest influence on their style was a local women in her 40s named Seesa Vaughn, who was also from a musical family. Harris died from a heart attack in the early 1980s, not long after Mitchell recorded him.