Corey Harris: Between Midnight and Day

Born in Denver, Colorado in 1969, Harris always knew that Africa lay behind the music he grew up loving—R&B, funk, reggae, blues—the whole ball of wax he thought of as “black music.” He went on to study anthropology at Bates College, and in the early ‘90s, made two extended trips to Cameroon. In Africa, Harris explored language, social reality and music in a complex, post-colonial setting, but as much as he loved looking outward, he came home determined to make his way as a blues musician. “Blues was what I understood deepest in myself,” says Harris, “because I grew up with that. My mom was of that generation. She lived in the depression in northeast Texas near Louisiana, so I always heard stories about it. It wasn’t a stretch for me to understand what was going on, even though it took me a while to be able to play it.”

Harris shook up the blues scene with his 1995 debut release, Between Midnight and Day, a masterpiece of rural blues exploration. Ever since then, he’s been finding ways to extend the journey, composing new songs, reinventing old ones, following his instincts fearlessly wherever they might lead.

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