These are tumultuous, yet inspiring, times, for Reggie Harris (no relation). While the African American struggle for Civil Rights has been an ongoing theme of the Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter’s solo recordings, and collaborations with ex-wife Kim, Magpie, Greg Greenway, Pat Wicker, and others since the early 1990s, recent events have reinforced his “perspective about how music can make a difference in the world.”

The Pioneer Valley Folk Society’s featured guest on June 4, via Zoom, Harris received Folk Alliance International’s Spirit of Folk Award, and the W.E.B. DuBois Legacy Award, in 2021. “I was blessed to connect with people who worked in the Civil Rights Movement,” Harris said. “People like Bernice Johnson Reagan, Pete Seeger, and some of the Freedom Singers, but I certainly didn’t start out to do this. I started playing music to get rich and famous.”

Harris’ songs are more than singable melodies and he said, “Racism and hatred have been with us for a very long time, but I can use music to bring those things to people’s attention.”

In 1992, one of Harris’ cousins, a schoolteacher, contacted him. Inspired to look into the family’s past by the TV miniseries “Roots,” she informed him that his great-great-great-grandfather was Confederate Gen. William Carter Wickham. His great-great-great-grandmother was Wickham’s slave. “As an African-American,” he said, “I know there was a lot of rape and people taking advantage of their women in slavery, but finding out that my family started on a plantation in Virginia was a real jolt.”

After keeping the information to himself for nearly a decade, “thinking about what it might mean,” Harris revealed his ancestry to a class he was teaching at the Swannanoa Gathering in 2010. “As luck would have it,” he said, “or maybe it’s the way things work, one of my students knew the Wickhams and put me in touch with Lisa Wickham, a descendant of William Carter.”

Recuperating at the time from a liver transplant, Harris was in the process of “reorienting what I wanted my music to be doing,” he remembered. “Not that it was a tremendous change, but I wanted to zero in on this idea of music, not only generating change and bringing people together, but looking at the hard questions.”

Harris’ shared his passion for music as a tool for social change with his ex-wife, Kim, whom he met in 1974. “We were both working as counselors at an overnight camp,” he recalled. “She was working in a different part of the camp, but one day, she came over and asked if she could borrow my bike. We got into a conversation and found out that we were both big fans of James Taylor and Cat Stevens, a lot of folk performers.”

“Kim had this amazingly beautiful voice,” he continued. “She still does, but she had a desire to get information. It was her idea to tackle stuff like [songs of] the Underground Railroad. I grew up with an ability to harmonize and I was the more passionate guitarist. We had a synergy that allowed us to develop a musical language together.”

As students at Temple University, the two musicians “started meeting on campus,” Harris recalled, “and bringing our guitars and singing. Before we knew it, we were singing around the Philadelphia area five, six nights a week. We got ourselves hooked up with coffeehouses in the area, but also played a comedy club for two and a half years, which was our introduction to the bigger world of entertainment. We opened for people like Jay Leno and Michael Keaton.”

“It was trial by fire,” he continued, “but we were challenged by it. We were thrown out there to the audience and had to find our way. The college coffeehouse circuit was beginning to pass into the next phase. We found ourselves touring around America, playing all these colleges and universities.”

Connecting with “folk from the Philadelphia Folksong Society,” Harris was further impacted by shows presented by a local organization, Swords and Plowshare. “They brought in people like Pete Seeger and Richie Havens,” he recalled, “and people doing political things. It changed my songwriting. I started writing about topical issues.”

After nine albums together, Kim and Reggie Harris announced their divorce in 2016, three years after Kim earned a Ph.D. in worship and the arts from Union Theological Seminary. She is currently an assistant professor of African American thought and practice in the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. “Not being part of a duo after 41 years was the biggest challenge,” her ex-husband said, “but it was time to open myself to what I could do. After thinking about the duo for so long, the possibilities for harmonies, and the framing around what she was singing, I now have the opportunity to express myself with more freedom.”

For further information, call 687-5002 or visit https://pvfs.us.