Corey Harris

Roughly around the time that OutKast and Goodie Mob rose from the South to represent country manners, several fleet-fingered musicologists were similarly rehabilitating the reputation of acoustic blues. The tradition of Son House and Charley Patton had long been maligned as shabby and backward by young black bluesmen who favored the flashy urbanity of the music's Chicago descendants. Along with Keb' Mo' and Alvin Youngblood Hart, however, Corey Harris was among the young African-Americans who steeped themselves in the styles and ethos of Delta music in the mid-'90s. He soon became the most strikingly original blues writer and performer since Robert Cray.

Of these three, Harris internalized the Delta ethos most startlingly. On Between Midnight and Day, Harris performs solo, brawnily adapting blues structures to his own idiosyncratic sense of rhythm -- no mean feat for an anthropology major from Denver. On Fish Ain't Bitin', a three-piece brass section (two trombones and a tuba) and simple percussion occasionally augment Harris' National steel for an off-kilter New Orleans feel. Meanwhile, his own compositions, which name-check Mumia Abu-Jamal and insist on the persistence of lynching, put the time-honored plaints of poverty and racism in contemporary perspective.

Harris was the most stylistically omnivorous of his Delta-influenced fellows, which meant that he'd never settle into one style forever. He goes electric on Greens From the Garden, which roams from reggae to Cajun even as it consolidates Harris' ability to integrate blues licks and lyrics alike into a modern idiom. ("Seen the devil last night, walk like a natural man," he observes on "Basehead," "Had a pipe in his mouth, a rock in his hand.") The roots retrenchment of Vu-Du Menz, a duet album with pianist Henry Butler, apparently exorcised his old-timey jones, since Harris was further out than ever when he returned to his electric guitar. Downhome Sophisticate rambles from Neville Brothers cover to roadhouse boogie to Central African soukous, too busy accumulating styles to attempt anything as neat as fusion. Murky, sardonic, playful, and restless, this may just be a bluesman's answer to Stankonia. (KEITH HARRIS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide