KEMP HARRIS
Kemp Harris defies categorization. He is a singer and songwriter, a master weaver of American musical styles. He’s an actor, activist, author, and storyteller, and an award-winning educator who has taught young public school students for more than 40 years.
Born in segregated Edenton, North Carolina, and transplanted to Massachusetts, Kemp honed his powerful, intimate performance style in Cambridge’s coffeehouses, developing into a magnetic frontman who has shared stages with artists such as Koko Taylor, Gil Scott-Heron, and Taj Mahal.
Kemp’s most recent album, Edenton, featuring vocals from the legendary Holmes Brothers, is a modern blues journey that fuses the personal and the political, the sacred and the profane, to haunting effect. Edenton’s title track, a bittersweet valentine to his birthplace, explores a simpler time in a racially-divided town with the clear-eyed grace that is a hallmark of Kemp’s work.