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 M ...