The essential Harry Case

Soul of the virtuoso.
by Crystal Jarvis















He won’t be categorized, labeled or time-stamped. His identity comes from his music, and that’s all that really matters. Photo by Kevin Qualls

Harry Case is a walking, talking, breathing musical note. A local guitarist with a natural flair for the strings, his repertoire is just an ear-shot away. He creates music and compositions with ease by imitating the sounds of everyday life, from the splash and clink of washing dishes at home to the click of a traffic light to the rattling wail of a truck’s horn.

While enjoying a picnic atop a hill near Anniston’s Martin Luther King Jr. Pavilion at Zinn Park, Case notices an 18-wheeler approaching. He immediately balls his fist and jugs his arm up and down, beseeching the driver to blare his horn.

“Hooonk! Hooonk!” the horn reverberates throughout 14th Street.

At that moment, Case hops up from his chair and twists and turns in search of his guitar to make an effort to clone the tone.

“Dat dat, dat dat. What tone is that?” he asks himself as he plucks his guitar strings to the rhythms of the horn.

“Yeah, I’m full of beats and rhythms,” Case says with an impish grin. “Man-made things usually have a tone I can figure out pretty quickly. But a bird is different — you can’t pinpoint him. By the time you do pinpoint it, he’s on to something else.”

Case thinks beyond the anatomy of acoustics. In his world, every existing atom has musical potential and releases energy to create gifts of song.

“My brain is receptive to anything and everything musical,” he says. “So if I hear something, I try to reproduce it so that I can have it in my sounds that I could call up. It’s ever-going in my world.”


In his world, every existing atom has musical potential and releases energy to create gifts of song. Photo: Kevin Qualls

His brain is also wired to somehow play four instruments at the same time. He plays guitar with his left hand, harmonica with his right hand, tambourine with his left foot and bass drum with his right foot. He’s a singer, a songwriter and a poet. Some people who know him call his talents ingenious.

“I kind of keep my guitar put away when Harry’s around,” says Tom Potts, president of Potts Marketing Group, a fellow musician and one of Case’s long-time friends. “He makes me want to go home and break my guitar open, he’s so good.”

The mystique of Harry Case is soulful and enigmatic. Behind opaque black sunglasses he hides not only his eyes but also his background.

Where’s he from?

“Oh, that’d nail me down too good,” he says with a slight chuckle. “It doesn’t really matter where you’re from. All that matters is your love for music.”

How old is he?

“Timeless,” he says.

Even his name is questionable. He says he only knows what others call him, doesn’t know if “Harry Case” is his real name or not. “Isn’t that wonderful — I don’t know who I am, so I’m free to keep reinventing myself, which is one of the reasons I don’t take myself seriously,” he says.

Eventually, Case reveals something of his past. He spent his infancy in Heflin in Cleburne County, but moved to Anniston as a young child.


Miles Davis, Ray Charles and Hank Williams were among the musical legends who influenced his impromptu style. Photo: Kevin Qualls

His musical biography began at the moment his mother conceived him, he says. She died when he was a toddler, but many folks told him she was a gospel singer and guitar player, a symbol of his musical roots. She was also a shaped-note singer, performing a style of folk music derived from Psalms, odes and anthems. Case recalls once desiring to experience shaped-note singing to find clues about the life of his mother, so he took a tape recorder and sat amid a group of the singers. Then he fell asleep, not remembering anything. “I thought, why did I go to sleep?” he says. “What about this made me go to sleep? She would rock me and I would go to sleep, and lo and behold, it worked on me. I started singing and playing music probably at my conception.”

After his mother died died, a woman Case calls “Aunt Sweetie” brought him to Anniston.

Growing up, music became his way of escape, the force that fed his happiness. His performances amazed and moved listeners, and their acceptance made him want to do it again. “It was the first time somebody said to me, ‘Wow, that’s so good,’” he said. “And I felt like I could do something.”

After high school (of course he won’t say where), he enrolled in Gadsden State Technical Institute, now called Gadsden State Community College, to study business. He planned to fulfill the dream of becoming a successful businessman — not his own dream, but other people’s dream for his life. Then one day he had an epiphany: Business was not what he was born to do. Music was his future.

“I wanted to be accepted,” he says, head down, sunglasses pointing at the grass near his feet. “It’s amazing. In life, you come out in this world in search of peace and acceptance.”


His brain is wired to somehow play four instruments at the same time: Guitar with his left hand, harmonica with his right hand, tambourine with his left foot and bass drum with his right foot. Photo: Kevin Qualls

Once he followed his own heart, it took him to places of which he could only have dreamed — Paris, Germany, Japan. He became the lead singer of the group 3 Degrees, which recorded an album with Ichiban, an English record label once based in Atlanta. “That’s how I got to know how much foreign countries love American music,” he says. “My life before music was a life without a purpose.”

These days, Case performs locally. He played and sang in Anniston at both the Pig Off barbecue competition at Zinn Park in April and at the Noble Street Festival in May.

On stage during the Noble Street Festival, Case thrived on of the energy of the audience. A few heads were bobbing from side to side and a few feet were pattering on the ground. “I just kind of looked out and looked at the people and saw where their heads were and produced a soundtrack.”

Miles Davis, Ray Charles and Hank Williams were among the musical legends who influenced his impromptu style. He listens to all genres of music, including jazz, country, blues, rock, hip-hip, R&B — even rap.

“They’ve got good music behind the dialogue, especially Ludacris (Christopher Bridges),” Case says as he begins to stroke the strings his guitar and spit a few of the rapper’s lyrics.

“Now where’d you get that platinum chain with dem diamonds in it/Where’d you get that matchin’ Benz with dem windows tinted?”

“There is just so much music — there is so much music,” he stresses. “I am thankful for my little brain, my little brain — that country brain that had the love and desire for music.”