Preview: Kemp Harris at the Eighth Step at Proctors; Saturday, Sept. 27, 2025 (The Addy Theatre, 432 State St., Schenectady)

Singer-songwriter Kemp Harris plays his Eighth Step debut this weekend after making music for decades. The under-the-radar artist has perhaps been overlooked, like NRBQ, for example, because he makes more than one kind of music.

Kemp Harris. Photo provided

All About Jazz hailed his “Edenton” album, named for his segregated North Carolina hometown and recorded with now-departed gospel-soul singing Holmes Brothers, for its diverse covers. The pub reported “Donny Hathaway’s ‘Tryin’ Times’ is a hypnotic blues vamp, rolling along in a place where Howlin’ Wolf would have felt at home.” The review also singled out Harris’s versions of Willie Nelson’s country classic “Night Life” and the gospel jewel “Didn’t It Rain.”

Downbeat, another jazz pub, also sang Harris’s praises for “Edenton,” citing it as “Earthy, insightful, haunting…sacred and profane. Harris is in perfect communion with the Holmes Brothers and his earthy band.”

A retired teacher and gay Black man, Harris is a northeastern transplant. He’s made big-city scenes, composing music for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Complexions Contemporary Ballet. He set up a songwriting residency at Boston’s Wang Theatre, and presented master classes at Berklee College of Music on Artists as Activists – along with Chad Stokes of the band Dispatch and members of the Urban Bush Women dance troupe.

Activism also shaped his new album “The America Chronicles” whose song titles illuminate the concerns inspiring his jazz/R&B/soul/gospel tunes: “Ruthie’s,” “Don’t You Hear Them America,” “Tulsa,” “Edenton,” “Standing Your Ground,” “Down,” “In For the Kill,” “This Is America,” “America/Border Song” and “Goodnight America.”

This is music and message working together at a high level, aimed at hearts and minds. It’s tough truths, written more in sadness than in anger; hard tales to tell at times, and sung with wise, pained tenderness. Like Randy Newman at his most devastatingly wry, and Joni Mitchell at her most sweetly hopeful, Harris sees his flawed, beloved country clearly and his aim at those flaws is true. Sometimes you can hear humor, but you always hear the truth in his words and voice.

Harris sang “Goodnight, America” to wide acclaim on Wanda Fischer’s “Hudson River Sampler” (WAMC) edition of Phil Ochs Song Night, and an audience vote selected him as winner of the Falcon Ridge 2024 Folk Festival Emerging Artist Showcase.

Freebo, Bonnie Raitt’s former longtime bassist, produced and arranged Harris’s songs on “The America Chronicles,” whose recent release will be celebrated at the Eighth Step Saturday. They recorded at the aptly-named Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with Harris at the mic and the piano and Freebo playing bass, plus Clayton Ivy, organ; Will McFarlane, guitar; Justin Holder, drums, and singer Alice Howe.

At the Eighth Step, Harris will play piano, with harmonica player Adam Osgood.

Speaking of the new album, Harris told Americana UK magazine, “At the end of the day, I’m an old Black man telling stories and spreading love.”

“Scary times,” mused Eighth Step executive artistic director Margie Rosenkranz of  the volunteer-run Eighth Step. “We need voices like his.”

Show time for Kemp Harris and Adam Osgood Saturday at the Eighth Step in Proctors The Addy Theatre is 7:30 p.m., doors at 7.

Tickets: $28 advance, $30 on Saturday, $45 Gold Circle (front and center) Other than Gold Circle, seating is open: first come, first served. 518-473-0723 or 346-6204. www.8thstep.org or www.proctors.org