Born on October 28; Ben Harper; singer, guitarist and activist

Ben Harper was born in 1969 in Claremont, California. He has a few gems tinged with rock, blues, and even reggae to his credit. A truly essential artist!

His mother, Ellen Chase-Verdries, is of Jewish descent, and his father, Leonard, has African-American and Cherokee roots. It's fair to say he comes from a truly mixed-race family, but one also deeply passionate about music. Raised on blues as well as reggae, Ben didn't have to look far for his major influences…

His childhood was also marked by the "Folk Music Center," an instrument store founded by his grandparents. You only had to reach out to grab one of the many guitars on display, or even a banjo. You could hardly imagine a more fertile ground. It was in this treasure trove that he discovered the distinctive sound of the slide guitar and the Weissenborn that, over time, would become his signature sound.

He began his career at the dawn of the 90s. His first album, "Welcome To The Cruel World" (1994), revealed the essence of the facets he would later refine. As today, with his sensitivity at the forefront, he already moved between poetry and social commitment. He has since recorded around twenty albums, including "Fight Eor Your Mind" (1995), "The Will To Live" (1997), and especially "Burn To Shine" (1999), which cemented his popularity in his native country and also in France, for example, where the local edition of "Rolling Stone" named him "Artist of the Year" in 2003.

To keep things interesting, he has alternated projects over the years and surrounded himself with different musicians, first in the Innocent Criminals, then the Blind Boys Of Alabama, Relentless7, and also in a duo with harmonica player Charlie Muelwhite, with whom he refines a stripped-down, not to say downright rootsy, blues-folk sound, notably on "No Merci In This Land," their second collaboration in 2018. In 2014, he also recorded "Childhood Home" with his mother, Ellen. For "Wide Open Light," his latest album to date in 2023, he continues to express his social conscience with the same intensity. And "Before The Rain Dried," his last song released in May 2025, is dedicated to his recently deceased friend Michael Ward and serves as a prelude to a new album.

A small anecdote to conclude this profile: while he doesn't yet have an avenue or a square named after him, Ben Harper already has a street named after him in the small village of Saint-Jean-d'Heurs in the Puy-de-Dôme region of France. It's just a small dead-end road, but every little bit helps!

Photo: Ben Harper with The Innocent Criminals at La Luna in Brussels, Belgium, on November 13, 1994