iSound

Corey Harris makes a good first impression. The first time I saw him was in the tiny back room of a club in New Orleans. He was sitting on a stool, a battered National steel guitar in his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned and sweat was dripping off his beard onto his chest. Each time he struck the rattling strings, tapped his ragged brown shoes on the dirty concrete floor or coaxed a phrase out of some place deep inside his gut, the audience's sense of place and time disappeared a little. Until all they were left with was this incredible musician who had somehow plugged himself not just into the deep-running waters around the Mississippi Delta but also the equally deep and raging currents of his own blood, of the journey from freedom to slavery to freedom of his own ancestors, whose roots he has spent much of his life researching.

Corey Harris makes an even better second impression. Talking with him opens up a world of experience. He has a degree in anthropology; he studied Pi...