‘I’ve Internalized My Mom’: Harry Connick Jr. Shares an Excerpt of His Book ‘Babe,’ In Tribute to Late Mother

Long before Harry Connick Jr. was a Grammy-winning singer/pianist, his mother, Anita-Francis Livingston Connick — who died when Harry was just 13 — dreamed of her prodigiously talented son one day playing Carnegie Hall. This past spring, on what would have been Anita-Francis’ 100th birthday, Connick made his late mom’s dream come true, playing three nights at the iconic New York concert hall with a three-part orchestral work that traces her life story from New York to Morocco and finally to their home of New Orleans.

On Friday (Sept. 25), Connick released Babe: Elaboratio, a recording of that orchestral work — written, arranged and produced entirely by Connick — made in Melbourne, Australia’s Iwaki Auditorium with 70-plus musicians from Orchestra Victoria and the Harry Connick Jr. Big Band, conducted by Jessica Gethin.

In further homage, Connick will release the book Babe: Elaboratio A Tribute to My Mother next week via Harper Celebrate that includes personal photography and delves deeper into how his mother (lovingly nicknamed “Babe”) shaped his life and artistry. Below, Billboard has an exclusive excerpt from the book — out Sept. 29 — that sets up Anita-Francis’ NYC beginnings and how her loss weighed on Connick’s life.

Babe: Elaboratio is music for big band and orchestra that I wrote for my mother, Anita-Francis Livingston Connick, in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of her birth, for a performance given at Carnegie Hall in New York City on May 22, 2026. …

My mother’s ancestors were Ashkenazi Jews and … moved from Europe to New York City sometime in the early 1900s. … [My grandparents,] two young Jews, a Russian man and a Hungarian woman, making a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, changing their last name from Levy to Livingston so they wouldn’t seem “too Jewish,” having six children in the throes of the Great Depression. …

I only knew her for a short time, as she died when I was thirteen, but those years gave me infinite joy and strength. 

There is only one positive that came from losing my dear mother at that time in my life, and that is to say that she … well, as I type this, I’ve changed my mind. There is no positive. I thought that maybe, as I’m now fifty-seven, I’d be able to see her death from a different perspective, and I certainly do. I’m able to freely talk about it now, something I was unable to do for years, decades. But to attempt to find a positive in that indescribable loss is something I, an artist who spends every moment trying to define the undefinable, will never be able to do. …

For Babe: Elaboratio, I was able to write whatever I heard in my head exactly how I heard it, without having to translate it to anyone else, allowing me to accomplish something I wanted to do: musically and personally articulate a delicate, complex, deeply profound and emotional sentiment. This composition describes my feelings much more effectively than any words I could string together over dinner – not that I’d be so presumptuous to assume that anyone would sit down and listen to the whole thing as an alternative to answering a simple question of “What was your mom like?” But now I have an answer. This music allows me to show people things about myself that I’ve never been able to say before. I’ve internalized my mom, so now my thoughts can float in the air for people to hear, see, and imagine, to hold in their hands and touch. That’s about as close as I can get to letting those who are interested understand the perfect blessing that was the time I had with my mom.

-Babe: Elaboratio A Tribute to My Mother is out Sept. 29 via Harper Celebrate.