There are fiddle players who play the instrument and then there is Anne Harris, a fiddler whose instrument plays her.
Harris is both a solo artist and a prolific side musician whose physical performing style is synched directly to her fiddle bow. She dances as she plays, often in place, and the thrust of the music, both highs and lows, is expressed through every muscle in her body.
“I play two instruments. One is my violin and one is my body,” said Harris. “For me, movement is a very important part of both how I play and how I express myself on an emotional level.”
This year, Harris celebrated two significant developments in her long career: the release of “I Feel It Once Again,” her seventh solo studio album, and the launch of a summer tour supporting blues veterans Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’, including a stop at Ravinia. Harris, who lives in Elmhurst with her husband and daughter, will bring her solo work on violin to the Fox Valley Folk Festival in Geneva, Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, where she will perform across two days.
Harris is accustomed to balancing a career as a solo player and as a sought-after collaborator since moving to Chicago nearly 30 years ago, after she graduated from the University of Michigan with a musical theater degree.
Her adopted hometown gave her the opportunity to live affordably while building a career and making connections in town. Her first was Susan Voelz, the violinist for Poi Dog Pondering, the Chicago collective that was reaching maximum popularity in the 1990s. “I was in love with their sound and what she brought to their sound,” said Harris.
To meet her, Harris enrolled in a class Voelz was teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Eventually, the two women hit it off and Harris was invited to her first professional recording session: “That’s the Way Love Is,” Poi Dog Pondering’s hit 1999 single and a remake of the house classic by Ten City. Harris, Voelz and violist Stacia Spencer perform the song’s signature countermelody.
The experience cemented her presence in Chicago, where Harris performed as a solo artist throughout the city at every club and theater on the circuit. She accompanied locals like Cathy Richardson, Ernie Hendrickson, and Michael McDermott, but her own music, ranging from folk-rock to Afrobeat, emerged as uniquely poetic with a spiritual flavor.
Harris, a songwriter and a singer, dates her interest in art back to her childhood in Yellow Springs, Ohio — “the funkiest place on the planet” due to the presence of Antioch College, a private liberal arts school. Her mother was the head librarian of the town’s public library system, and her father worked as an engineer in nearby Dayton. Both were “intellectually stimulating people” who raised her, her sister and her brother “to be big thinkers” by exposing them to art and music.
Harris studied classical violin throughout her childhood. However, when a teacher told her that classical players don’t move around on their chairs so much, Harris knew she was meant for earthier genres. In Chicago, that translated to the blues: At one of her gigs at Buddy Guy’s Legends, she met Otis Taylor, a folklorist and musician who had recently released “Recapturing the Banjo,” his 2008 breakthrough album. His work aimed to broaden the public’s understanding of the banjo by presenting songs that exposed its roots in West Africa, played by contemporary blues figures like Keb’ Mo’ and Alvin Youngblood Hart.
Taylor invited Harris to join his band; she stayed for nearly a decade.
“That was my gateway to my university of the blues. I got to dive into the music in a way I didn’t before. It changed the course of my career,” she said.
The experience made her a proficient blues musician, something she didn’t expect during those early classical lessons back in Ohio. She also became a rare fiddler in a genre dominated by electric guitars. Along the way, the music helped her hone her craft as a soloist, capable of sitting in with anyone given minutes’ notice.
That versatility has made her a natural collaborator both onstage and in the studio. Over the years, it led to tours and sessions with a wide range of artists, including Anders Osborne, Cracker, Living Colour, Amy Helm, Los Lobos, Shemekia Copeland and Vieux Farka Touré.
Despite a busy summer, she is pausing later this season to celebrate the new songs on “I Feel It Once Again.” Harris said the album represents a new direction for her: She left Chicago to record in Nashville with producer Colin Linden, who has worked with Bob Dylan, John Prine and Rhiannon Giddens. Linden encouraged her to stretch her musical boundaries by playing mandolin throughout the record. The songs, she said, had been around for years. “They’re like my little kids,” she said. The album was an opportunity “to build a space for them.”
The album — a mix of Americana, spirituals and fiddle instrumentals — is quieter and more ethereal than Harris’ typical live fare. “I love the big show and giant audience and loud rocking, but this is definitely an introspective record. That’s an important part of me, and one that is seldom seen,” she said. “For people who know me through other projects and people, it’s an offering of what I do on my own.”
It includes a cover of “Snowden’s Jig,” a traditional folk song she first heard in 2010. That was a cover by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the stringband trio that advocates for a greater understanding of the roles Black people have played in country and folk music. Harris said traditional folk music was always part of her life; she and her sister would sing vocal harmonies to songs they pulled out of a songbook they found at home. The Chocolate Drops cover “made me feel I’m not alone,” she said. “That I’m not the only Black person playing folk music.”
Part of that reckoning is the very instrument Harris is choosing to play this summer: a new violin she commissioned from Amanda Ewing, the first Black woman violin maker officially accredited in the United States. She said it was the first time the exchange was made between two Black women. A GoFundMe helped raise nearly $20,000 for the commission, and the instrument made its public debut when Harris played it at the Grand Ole Opry at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in May.
To date, Harris was playing on the same violin given to her by her parents when she was 10. “I had no idea who the maker of my instrument looked like” in the past, she said. “When I saw [Ewing’s] story, I was drawn to her and needed her to make me a violin. I needed a violin from the hands of a maker who looked like me.”
In a way, the wider resurgence of interest in Black people’s role in country and folk music has caught up with her, not the other way around. Harris, who released her first album in 2001, had already been continuing that lineage before many of the namechecked figures today, such as Giddens, Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla.
“There’s now a viable movement of Black and female players who are telling stories with banjos and fiddles,” said Harris. “It’s an exciting time.”
Mark Guarino is a journalist based in Chicago and the author of Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.