his idol. >> i said, mr. sin rat ra, you hit this high a flat on this particular song. how did you do it? i just opened my mouth and it was there. you know? >> this is "piers morgan tonight." ♪ i take you just the way you are ♪ >> harry connick jr., welcome. >> thank you. >> you are a man of so many hats it's almost ridiculous. a singer, pianist, big band conductor, a composer, an actor, three grammys, 25 million albums sold worldwide. you starred in a broadway musical. "on a clear day you can see forever" which opens in december. and you have a children's book. not content with dominating every other genre of entertainment, you're into the kids market. >> i guess what makes me want to do this stuff is that -- i guess what drives me is real interest in all these different areas. it was never really about -- i know you were joking about dominating these areas, but it's never really been about that for me. you know, things kind of happen organically, and broadway sort of happened out of a career in performing, which happened out of practicing piano when i was a kid. this just seemed like a natural sort of transition after this -- we did a children's musical. it just seemed like a fun thing to be a part of. >> do you like to think you're part of that dying breed, an all-around entertainer. there aren't many of them these days? >> i don't know how many of them there are or aren't. i do think i'm -- i like to think of myself as kind of an all-around entertainer. i just don't know how many opportunities a lot of those entertainers have any more. being on broadway, like we're rehearsing for this show now, piers, this room is filled with the most talented people in the world. i mean, these people who work on broadway, in my opinion, are the most gifted of everyone. i mean, they really know how to dance. they really know how to act. they really know how to sing. they know how to perform. and outside of a broadway context, you have to wonder, because things are so compartmentalized now, how many opportunities do these so-called all-around entertainers have. >> if i cut off your cord to everything else, left you with one thing, what would you do? >> i guess play piano, you know? because that's the thing i started doing when i was a little kid. so that goes back to when i could think, you know, sitting at the piano when i was 3 and 4 years old. it would be unfortunate -- >> you played mozart at the age of 5, right? >> no. i was playing "when the saints go marching in" at age of 5. >> that's the modern mozart. what was the moment -- obviously, your parents realize, i think, quite early on, that you were very gifted. what was the moment when you thought this could be more than just a hobby? this could be my lifetime thing? >> well, my dad was the district attorney of new orleans for about 30 years. when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early 70s, when i was 5 years old. my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. and they got an upright piano on the back of a flat bed truck and i played it. i think it was from that minute when i kind of looked over the piano and saw people were interested probably more in the novelty of a 5-year-old playing than anything great that was happening musically, but the feeling i got of sort of being the center of attention because of something i love to do, it was from that moment on where i said, everything else is going to come second to that. i mean, it was just i had blinders on to be a performer. >> and you were brought up in new orleans, the sort of home of music. i guess everywhere you go there, you're surrounded by people entertaining. >> right. >> it must be a great inspiration to anybody in that business. >> unbelievable, not only an inspirational, but it's so functionally instructive. i mean, to have -- some of these musicians i grew up playing with were playing with louie armstrong. >> amazing. >> yeah. to be there as a 6-year-old in a club on bourbon street and have them say, oh, harry jr., come on up and play with us. and i play whatever song i play. and then the next week i come up and i play a different tune. on the break, they would show me, hey, man, this is what you're doing right and this is what you're doing wrong. to have that kind of tutelage firsthand. >> you can't buy it. >> no, really incredible. >> tell me about your parents. >> well, my mother, i knew until i was 13. she died when i was 13. she was from new york, a jewish background. and met my dad when they were working for the government in morocco. and they got married in 1953, moved back to new orleans. my dad was from mobile, alabama. and then grew up in new orleans. so they came back to new orleans. they both were lawyers. and they had a record store in the '50s about ten years before i was born, sort of make money to put themselves through law school. and by the time i came around in '67, they were both practicing law, and my mom and i were -- were supertight. i think she really wanted me to be an artist. you know? she used to like to tell people she wanted to be beethoven's mother. that was her thing. she wanted to be the mother of this person. and my dad, although he was very busy politically, always found the time to support me, to set the right example for me, and i have an older sister, too, who is another hero of mine. and -- >> in your family, just taught to be very respectful. if someone older than you walked in the room, you should stand up. >> yeah, that's a southern thing, though. do they do that in england? >> england used to be a bit like that. i think it's lost its way in the last 25 years. it's nowhere near as polite. when i go down somewhere south here, dallas or houston, i'm always struck by people calling me sir and the level of natural politeness. >> it's true. >> much more pronounced here than it was in england any more. >> is that right? >> yeah. >> i remember the first date with my wife, i pulled the chair out so she could sit down. she said, oh, i would like to sit there. i'm pulling it out for you, baby. that's the way we were taught. the guy walks behind the girl when she's going up the steps and in front of the girl when she's going down. you never give a one-word answer. you don't say, harry, did you do your homework, yeah. you just say yes, sir, no, sir. when your dad is the d.a. and your mother is a judge, it wasn't about be respectful. there wasn't a whole lot of room for messing around. >> a lot of pressure growing up in new orleans. you have spoken very movingly about your mother because an awful age to lose a mother, i think, 13. i've got a son about that age now. you are becoming a young man. to lose this woman who was so close to you must have been a really huge blow at the time. >> piers, it was the worst thing probably to this day that's ever happened to mean and there were years and years and years that i didn't want to talk about it. in my 20s. and i started to accumulate some -- i was more in the public eye, people started to know who i was. i would never talk about it. i would get angry with journalists if they would even bring it up. it was just awful. and it took me a long time to finally realize that it's tok talk about it and, you know, she was my mom. i had her for 13 years. before i was worn,y started a diary to me and a separate one for my sister. she didn't know what sex we were going to be because we weren't born yet. dear baby, you're in my tummy right now. from that moment till i was 13, man, i have every birthday party, every gift i was given to me, every piano recital, everything was documented. i look at that now and i thank god. i had her for 13 years, that's all i had her for, but man, it was profoundly impactful to me. >> she had cancer. >> yes. ovarian cancer. >> did you realize that she was dying or not? >> i knew she was not feeling well, but at the time she got cancer, i was 10. my sister was 13. and we were a little bit young, i think. maybe my sister might have known. i knew she had cancer, but i thought, she's going to get through this. she can get through anything. it wasn't until the day she died -- she came home from the hospital. everyone knew she was going to die. i'm sure she wanted to die at home. i remember her sitting in this little recliner chair and i would go into the other room. she had given me a seven-foot yamaha grand peay own. you mentioned mozart. the mozart concerto that she would love me to play. i would play that and run in, what did you think, then play in more. the day she died, my aunt jessie -- my dad had sent us out. i think everybody knew that was going to be the day. i was still oblivious to it. i was at a piano recital where my aunt jessie came and said, your mother just died. and brought me home. and it was then that i realized for the first time, she's not there any more. >> your father, obviously, had to carry on the family. i mean, it must have been incredibly tough for him, too. and you developed a very strong bond with him subsequently. >> yeah, my dad is my hero. i mean, he's 85 now. >> he still lives in new orleans. >> he still lives there. he's in great health. he's handsome and strong and got an incredible moral and ethical backbone. and i just am -- i couldn't have been luckier with my parents. >> having been the driving force for you to live your dream. >> yeah. >> she never got to see you realize that dream. >> well, i like to think that she's seeing it now in some capacity, you know. in some way that i don't understand. but i feel her. obviously, she's not really here. but you know where i really see it, piers, is in my kids, man. i was at rehearsal for this broadway show the other day. my oldest daughter georgia came. and i think georgia looks like my mom a little bit and has some of the same sort of -- my mother had -- it was almost like she had a sixth sense about her and she was very kind of gypsy-like in her ability to understand people and situations. and my oldest daughter has that in her personality. and she came in to rehearsal and, hey, dad. and i couldn't go over to her because i was in the middle of a scene. and david turner, this brilliant actor who i'm lucky enough to share the stage with, said i've never seen like a daughter show -- as a 15-year-old show that kind of love to their dad. so i think my mom, she has to be manifested through them somehow. i don't know. i just feel -- i feel more happy than sad. and i think it's because of my wife and my children. >> you've had an extraordinary marriage. i want to talk to you a little bit. you're surrounded by women. >> i wouldn't have it any other way. >> let's have a break and come back and talk to you about another very difficult time for you, which was hurricane katrina. obliterating the place that you grew up and how you played a big part in helping that town rebuild itself. ♪ happy to be near you when you need someone to cheer you ♪ come on in. 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[ announcer ] we are insurance. ♪ we are farmers bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum ♪ this is like some freak accident, you know, with the levee breaking and that's where i grew up is where that breach in the levee was is my neighborhood. and this is just -- how can you -- how can you -- when the storm was over and then this started. >> that's harry connick jr. in new orleans after hurricane katrina hit. you went pretty well straight down there. when did you hear about it? how quickly did you realize how bad it was? >> i heard about it on -- i knew the storm was coming. and i mean, we get storms all the time in new orleans. i mean, you know, i was worried, you know, that my dad's house wouldn't lose power and thins like that, but i mean, who would have predicted that type of devastation would have occurred? i got down there -- let's see -- the day after the levee broke. that's what freaked everybody out. we grew up right there at those levees. we played on them. like a hill with a concrete barrier on the top. that was just the place we hung out. you just couldn't conceive of those levees actually breaking. but that was a mess. i mean, just unbelievable. unbelievable. it was scary. >> when you got there and saw the scale of devastation, i mean, as someone who had been born there, raised there, what was going through your mind? >> it's hard to articulate, piers. i remember going past the cemetery where my mother's buried. she's buried with my grandparents. it was literally a lake. people who don't know new orleans, i mean, it's below sea level. you can't bury people underground. you have to bury them above the ground. and those tombstones and whatever, monuments that there were marking the gravesites were under water. the entire thing. i'm thinking like everything from where's my mother's bones, where is my dad, like where -- it was like a nightmare, man. and the fact that it happened in new orleans was really strange. going down to the convention center and seeing thousands of -- piers, there were like 15,000 people at the convention center, not at the superdome where all the press was, but there were people having seizures. people without medication. i'm not talking about poor black people, i'm talking about everybody. there were just people who did not have the means of getting out of new orleans. they were all there. and i showed up and a lot of people know me. i remember this old white woman came up to me and said, i haven't had my heart medication in three days. they told us to come here, they said they would pick us up. do you know anything? i'm saying, oh, my god, this is -- we're not in a third world country here. >> yet the authorities seemed to behave like they were in a third world country. i mean t speed of reaction was scandalously slow. when you look back at it, why do you think that was? why was it not just obvious there was this awful disaster unfurling? >> i'm not privy to all the details that unfolded and led people to make certain decisions. i do know that off the air we were talking about my manager ann marie wilkins. i've been with her for a long time. she said this is not the time to blame anyone, at least for you, harry. don't blame anyone. do what you can. and i realized as time went on, i never did -- i didn't need to blame anyone. i mean, the problem was there. what do we do to fix it? and since then we've established along with habitat for humanity and my dear friend branford marsalis, and the musicians village, all that was done without saying look what you did. >> president bush in his own memoirs, he does accept criticism for quite a lot of his actions, not least of all looking down from the plane and being photographed looking down and stuff like that. but he lays a lot of the blame on a more local level, that he was prohibited from sending in the national guard and stuff. i mean, i sort of read it and thought, well, if you're the president of the united states and you've got so many of your people dying in such horrific circumstances, you just throw the rule book out, don't you? you just do what it takes? >> you'd like to think so. but it was a traumatic time for everybody. i was down there doing some -- the only way i could get down there is bob wright, the former president of nbc, was kind enough to get me down on his plane. he said, would you do some correspondence work for us to let us know what's going on. heck, yeah, i'll do whatever it takes as long as you get me down there. i had a satellite phone. when i was at the convention center, i stood up on a chair because it wasn't about trying to figure out who did what wrong. i was like, hey, you all need to send some people over here. there's people who haven't had food and water for a number of days. there were dead bodies there. there were people seizing, people without medication, without any kind of plumbing or electricity or no utilities at all. so it wasn't about -- it was about people stepping up and doing what they could. you know, at this point, what good is it going to do to blame local or state or federal? >> some people said it was kind of surreptitious racism, that it was the fact that there were so many poor black people meant that the authorities didn't respond in the way if they'd all been middle class white people. >> well, i mean, my dad's not poor and black and, you know, he had a hell of a time to get out of new orleans, my aunt jessie and uncle john were on their rooftop. and the last time i checked they were as white as i was. really at this point in my relationship with that event, and this may upset some people to say, but who cares? we just need to move forward. you know what i'm saying? people mess up all the time. they messed up then, whatever. what can we do? all i know is that we built 80 houses and brought a lot of musicians -- >> let's have a break and talk about how you helped rebuild new orleans after katrina because it's a fascinating story. and i want to know what it's like now down there. ♪ let me take you there [ male announcer ] every day, thousands of people are choosing advil®. 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[ female announcer ] phillips' colon health. with regard to trying to bring some of the people who were displaced back to new orleans, namely the musicians, you know. new orleans is so known for its musical culture and heritage, we wanted to make sure that they have a future here. so we teamed up with habitat for humanity and came up with the idea of the musicians village. >> harry connick jr. in new orleans after katrina struck. the rebuilding process was, obviously, very, very difficult. there was complete devastation in large parts of the city. you were there for a lot of this process and have been very integral in helping new orleans get back on its feet. how hard has it been? and where is new orleans now? do you feel like it's recovered? >> right after the storm, i called my dad and i said, we have to rebuild the city. and he says, what are you talking about? i said, we need to put a coalition together of people and have a think tank. he says, have you forgotten like what your grade point average was in high school? and have you forgotten that you're a piano player -- he wasn't quite that abrupt, but what he was saying was, that's not what you do. you know, figure out something that you do. you are not going to be able to rebuild this city. so my manager, ann marie wilkins and branford marsalis and myself, we are musicians. i can't take credit for trying to rebuild new orleans. but i can take credit for musicians village which is a great prototype on how when people really focus, they can bypass the bureaucracy and make things happen. we ended up building 80 houses in a short amount of time. they're all inhab