Corey Harris was born in Denver, Colorado and earned a degree from Bates College in Maine, a geographic footprint that shatters the usual map of acoustic blues. Rather than moving to Nashville or New York after graduating in 1991, he went to Cameroon on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study language, then took a Teach for America job in Napoleonville, Louisiana. This episode argues that he reverse-engineered the blues, studying the tonal West African languages whose inflections a slide guitar mimics, then planting himself in the rural South where those traditions collided with American circumstances. A 1994 encounter in Helena, Arkansas with producer Larry Hoffman pulled him out of the classroom and into the 1990s acoustic revival.

The conversation covers his 1995 debut Between Midnight and Day, built on covers of Sleepy John Estes, Fred McDowell, Charley Patton and Muddy Waters, and the 1997 follow-up Fish Ain’t Bitin’, recorded in New Orleans with a tuba and two trombones instead of bass and drums, which won the W.C. Handy Award for Best Acoustic Blues Album. It then traces his 2002 collaboration with Ali Farka Touré on Mississippi to Mali, his contributions to the Mermaid Avenue projects with Billy Bragg and Wilco, a Johnny Cash tribute, his prominent role in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS series The Blues, the MacArthur Fellowship and Bates honorary doctorate he received in 2007, and his more recent reggae-infused work from Charlottesville, Virginia, including Chicken Man in 2024.

• Why tonal languages in Cameroon function as the structural grammar of blues guitar
• How a tuba changes the rhythmic pocket of a song compared with an electric bass
• Why the drone-note fingerpicking of Mali and the Delta turned out to be dialects of the same language
• What connects Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash to West African desert blues
• Why preserving a tradition means letting it grow and hybridize rather than sealing it behind glass