Corey Harris
Extending Blues Roots
by Eric Fine

Corey Harris' music demonstrates how much road the blues has traveled since the 1960s folk revival. In those days, the rediscovery of aging legends such as Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and Skip James exposed audiences at coffeehouses and folk festivals to blues for the first time. Many regarded the relatively simple 12-bar architecture as a cultural phenomenon, an ancient artifact unearthed at the foot of a pyramid.

Consequently, the aspiring bluesmen of the day seldom veered too far from what they heard on records. In fact, these younger folks sometimes attempted to reproduce the music down to the cracks and scratches that marred the original post-World War I recordings. But nearly four decades have passed since those heady days, and a few new chapters have been written.

Harris qualifies as a revivalist of acoustic blues, but one who is looking to extend the boundaries. At 32, he is neither old nor indigent. He came of age not in the rural South but in the Western part of the country. He was raised on a musical diet that included rock 'n' roll, funk, R&B, hip-hop, gospel, and folk. "I was also influenced by whatever records my family played, which was mostly just different types of black music," said Harris, who grew up outside Denver. "[There was] some blues, but really not as much."

Harris studied anthropology and linguistics at Bates College in Maine, and then spent nearly a year teaching in West Africa and another teaching in rural Louisiana. He doesn't think of himself as a bluesman per se, but as a musician versed in a variety of styles. Like many of his peers, old and young, he's spent time studying the work of early masters such as Lightnin' Hopkins, Son House, and Charley Patton. But not to the exclusion of everything else.

"I listen to everything," Harris said. "It's not like I even have listened to those records for several years. That's not what I listen to on a day-to-day basis. I'm talking about when I was younger and first starting to play, those were things that influenced me."

But it was Harris' ability to interpret the older stuff that caught the ear of Larry Hoffman, a blues renaissance man of sorts. Hoffman initially heard Harris in the mid-1990s while the then-unknown singer and guitar player was performing on the street during the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas. The two ran into each other a few months later in New York and struck up a casual friendship.

Harris began working with Hoffman in Baltimore shortly after he moved from New Orleans to Charlottesville, Virginia. The partnership yielded Between Midnight and Day (Harris' 1995 debut) and Fish Ain't Bitin' (1997). "I was completely blown away by his voice," Hoffman recalled. "To tell you the truth, I really felt it was the perfect time for blues to have a young, black acoustic bluesman come out, and if nothing else, squelch the rumor that …young black men no longer cared about the blues.

"And here obviously was a guy who was so committed to the blues and to his music…I thought this would be just a great thing to happen. At the time there wasn't anybody doing that. That's what I figured blues needed."

In Hoffman's mind, Between Midnight and Day heralded the arrival of a new traditionalist — someone who could take advantage of the small but significant spotlight generated by the popularity of Robert Johnson's The Complete Recordings (1990) and Eric Clapton's Unplugged (1992). Certainly, the folks at the Blues Foundation agreed with Hoffman's appraisal. On the strength of his first album, Harris received nominations for W.C. Handy awards — the equivalent of a Grammy in the blues world — in several categories. Fish Ain't Bitin' won a 1998 W.C. Handy Award for acoustic album of the year.

But Harris had other ideas about his career. During several interviews that took place late last year, Harris spoke of his admiration for reggae legends Bob Marley and Augustus Pablo and West African guitar player Boubacar Traore. His familiarity with folk and pop singers runs the gamut from Woody Guthrie and Odetta to Bob Dylan and Neil Young.

"I try to look at music…from a historical standpoint and look at it [structurally]," he said. "And yeah, all that's to say [that] music is really so much related. I'm not only talking about music of the different styles that are here in the West, but music all around the world. I'm no musicologist, but I like to just get into different types of [black] music. I just try to [be] a student of the different traditions that [are] out there, be it blues or be it African music, be it it jazz or whatever, because it's all related. There's something that I, as a musician, can learn from each of those."

This is an excerpt from issue #93.