ERIN HARPE • Roots & Blues

“This album was a real labor of love. I’ve always loved Mississippi John Hurt’s music, since I was a little girl listening to my dad play his songs around the house,” award-winning blues artist and educator Erin Harpe shares about her latest recording. She credits Hurt’s guitar style as being a big influence on her playing, with its alternating bass thumb-picking and syncopated melodic runs. Erin pays homage to the legendary bluesman with Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me: A Tribute To Mississippi John Hurt, a stripped-down album that she recorded with partner Jim Countryman in their home studio in Boston. The 10-song album is OUT NOW on Erin Harpe Music through the VizzTone Label Group!

The Boston-based multi-band leader, producer, indie label owner, singer-songwriter, and guitarist leads the electric blues quartet Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers with her husband and label co-owner, bass player Jim Countryman. This outfit has released three well-received albums. The couple also founded the neo-new wave-y Afro-pop group, Lovewhip, which has released four critically-acclaimed albums. Erin has issued a pair of acoustic blues albums, and maintains an acoustic blues duo with Jim playfully nicknamed “CBD,” Country Blues Duo. In addition, Erin is also an in-demand fingerstyle blues educator who in 2016 released the DVD Women of the Country Blues Guitar through the esteemed Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. 

Select collective career highlights include rave press in LA Weekly, Boston’s Weekly Dig, Boston Herald, DownBeat Magazine, and Living Blues Magazine, among other outlets. She’s a Boston Music Award Winner and a five-time BMA nominee, and she is a New England Music Award winner and an International Blues Challenge Semifinalist. Erin has had songs featured on Showtime’s Shameless, MTV’s Veronica Mars, Paris Hilton’s BFF, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, and many other shows. 

Erin has jammed with iconic acoustic blues artists Phil Wiggins (of Cephas & Wiggins), Warner Williams and Jay Summerour, Eleanor Ellis, Jontavious Willis, and James Montgomery. She’s opened for legends such as ZZ Top, T-Model Ford, Honeyboy Edwards, Roy Bookbinder, and James Cotton. Erin has played at the House of Blues, Caffe Lena, Club Passim, the International Blues Challenge, South by Southwest, the New York State Blues Festival, and many other festivals and venues around the US. Her duo has just finished a wildly successful month-long tour of the UK, their 5th, and will be back overseas in April 2026 for their 3rd Spain tour.

Erin’s new album Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me is an inspired return to the country blues that shaped her. The 10-song album is produced by Erin – her fourth production credit –and co-produced and engineered by Jim. It follows up 2020’s Meet Me In The Middle, recorded during pandemic lockdown in the couple’s third-floor Boston apartment, which won the prestigious Album of the Year from the New England Music Awards.

One hidden hero of Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me is its producer. Erin’s production is sparse and crisp, and captures the warmth of a live performance. Her journey as a producer has been a natural evolution from hitting record on a mini disc player to watching fancy producers work and taking notes.  “For this album, I wanted people to feel like they were in the room with us – like they were sitting on the floor in front of me and Jim at a house party.I believe we stayed true to Mississippi John Hurt’s style & essence!” Erin says.

erin’s history

Blues is the first music Erin remembers hearing, specifically Piedmont blues, a syncopated, fingerpicked variant of the blues popularized in the East coast region by artists such as Blind Blake and Josh White, and later Rev. Gary Davis and Cephas & Wiggins. Arlo Guthrie used Piedmont guitar accompaniment for his well-known monologue-style song “Alice’s Restaurant” which was Erin’s entry into playing this style. 

Erin’s father is a blues fanatic, guitar collector, and talented performer who wrote a book about the highly coveted guitar brand, Stella Guitars, The Stella Guitar Book by Neil Harpe. She recorded a duo album with her father, Delta Blues Duets. Her mother played a little guitar, was a graphic designer, and met Erin’s father in the folk music scene. Growing up, Erin experienced blues music as the soundtrack to impromptu backyard jams and barbershop hoedowns. She later sought solace in it during her teenage years when she experienced her own blues, grappling with adolescence and her mother and father’s tumultuous relationship.

Before she embraced the blues as a musician, Erin staked out her own musical territory through playing flute and studying classical music. While in high school, a boy she had a crush on wanted to be the voice of the “Alice’s Restaurant” monologues. Erin saw this as a chance to win his affection through providing accompaniment. When she went home to ask her father to teach her the interweaving melodic pattern, he cautioned her of its difficulty. Pressed on by adolescent love she learned it (in one week) and soon found her way into the blues. 

During college, Erin studied abroad in Kenya and developed a love for Afro-pop. After graduation, she moved to Boston and began playing at coffee houses and open mics performing solo blues. This is where she met her husband, Jim, who remains a big part of Erin’s story, and co-founded with Erin the boutique label Juicy Juju Records. For a period of time, Erin took a detour from the blues, indulging her Afro-pop jones with Lovewhip which earned her a lot of plum exposure. However, in wake of the group’s success, she also found herself revisiting her father’s blues record collection. 

In 2010 Erin and Jim formed the band Erin Harpe & the Delta Swingers. After being invited to play NotSXSW (John Conquest’s Americana answer to South by Southwest) as a solo artist a few times, Erin and Jim decided it was time to start a blues band, and The Delta Swingers was born! In their first year as a band, they won the Boston Blues Challenge, and were in Memphis for the first time at the International Blues Challenge, as a quartet lead by acoustic guitar with electric bass and harmonica, and drums. While there, the band was asked to play the prestigious VizzTone Showcase at the Rum Boogie on Beale St. In the excitement of trying to impress the crowd, in the middle of the first song, Erin accidentally kicked over her acoustic guitar, breaking it's neck. Luckily the host, Bob Margolin (Muddy Waters Band), was there, and what came next changed everything. He bestowed Erin with his Gibson Les Paul gold top electric guitar, and the band went electric. Since then, Erin has honed her sound, and her favorite electric guitars are her prized Epiphone Wilshires, through a Marshall Origin tube amp.