Cover photo © 2023 Marilyn Stringer

The term “overnight success” has always been one of the most overused phrases in the music world, but it’s never been more true in the case of guitarist DKieran Harrell, a soft-spoken young man who’s gone from total obscurity into sharing some of the biggest stages around the world and trading licks with the biggest names in the blues in the past few years.

He possesses a playing style that emulates B.B. King right down to the highly emotive vibrato technique on the strings that the Beale Street Blues Boy produced without compare. But one listen to DKieran’s attack and you’ll recognize instantly that he’s already found his own voice and that he’s a prodigy destined for greatness.

A larger-than-life presence with a sweet personality, he writes songs with a maturity far beyond his years. And his silky-smooth vocals – which are a perfect match with his confident, precise attack on the six-string – are chockfull of honest emotion that only someone with blue-to-the-bone sensitivity can express.

It’s an amazing achievement for the 25-year-old who never played out in public until four years ago – something that’s even more amazing when you consider that he’s completely self-taught and has always been able to hear music in his head but has difficulty reading and writing music charts. But one thing’s certain: DKieran Harrell was born to play the blues.

He’d just returned home after playing the main stage at the Calgary Blues Festival with backing from one of the best rhythm sections in the business — drummer Tony Coleman and bassist Russell Jackson — and catching his breath before setting off on more whirlwind travel when Blues Blast caught up with him.

Harrell came into the world on April 24, 1999, in Ruston, La., a city best known for producing star athletes – football and basketball hall of famers Terry Bradshaw, Fred Dean, Willie Roaf and Karl Malone, country singer Trace Atkins – all of whom attended Louisiana Tech — and even more from Grambling University a few miles to the west.

Hip-hop, rap and Southern soul dominated the airwaves then and now, and blues was an afterthought if anything. Fortunately for DKieran, however, he spent plenty of time with his grandparents out in the country in Spearsville – a hamlet of 121 close to the Arkansas border – where blues ruled the day and where he makes his home today.

“My grandfather, C.H. Jackson, would play a lot of blues records,” he remembers, “from Little Johnny Taylor to B.B. King, Sam & Dave and James Brown, too. If you name ‘em, he played ‘em. There was hip-hop and rap in the house, but I wasn’t really fond of it. I liked the blues and soul.”

DKieran got his unusual name, he says, because C.H’s mom – who was only 13 at the time of his birth – didn’t give him a name, only initials. “When I was born and he saw my name, he told my mother: ‘I’m gonna call him D.K.,’” he notes. That’s were D.K. comes from.”

By the time he was eight, Harrell already knew he future would be in music – something that his mom Christal, a phlebotomist who spent a couple of decades drawing blood during 12-hour shifts at Ruston’s Lincoln Jenner Hospital, knew much earlier.

The realization came when D.K. was about 18 months old and sitting in a car seat when Christal and her sister were traveling from Spearsville to Monroe about an hour to the east to shop at the mall. Before they left, C.H. handed her a copy of Deuces Wild, B.B.’s Grammy-nomination compilation of duets, telling her: “If you put this on, he’ll be okay the whole trip” – something that Harrell insists today would never have been an issue, adding: “My mama said I was so quiet, she used to worry about me even when I’d be sittin’ right next to her.

“So we’re drivin’ down the road, and the album gets to B.B. and Tracy Chapman singin’ ‘The Thrill Is Gone,’ and my mama starts hearin’ this noise, thinkin’ there’s something wrong with the CD player. She turned it up and down, but it wouldn’t go away.”

Finally, she turned around and saw that her son was swinging his head from side to side with his eyes closed and singing “the thrill is gone, the thrill has gone away, the thrill has gone…”

“That’s actually when I started talkin,’” he says. “She was so excited, she pulled the car over and tried to get me to say other stuff…‘mama’…‘daddy’…but all she was gettin’ was ‘the thrill is gone.’ Now, she tells people in a joking way: ‘Ever since he started singin’ in that car seat, I can’t get him to shut up!’”

By the time he was in first grade, Harrell was a huge Ray Charles fan thanks to hearing his songs “What’d I Say,” “Hard Times” and “Hit the Road, Jack” in trailers for the movie Ray. “I remember standin’ in front of the TV and sayin’: ‘Man, I wanna go see that,’ and my stepfather, Brent Brooks – who also played a big part in me hearin’ a lot of great artists – said: ‘Then we’re gonna go see it!’ We go, and I was just giddy in the movie theater.”

There were two soundtrack CDs for the film, and D.K. was such a fan that they were in regular rotation in his home. “I’d be playin’ ‘em loud while sittin’ at my great-grandmother’s piano in my Hanes white T-shirt and underwear, wearing some shades,” he remembers, “and impersonating him as I banged at the keys.”

When YouTube launched in 2005, Brent was in the first wave of users, and he quickly turned his stepson onto Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Jerry Butler & the Impressions, Curtis Mayfield and Gene Chandler – a love affair that endures today. “He was playin’ the hits, man!” Harrell insists. “He was playin’ some heavy stuff!”

By the time he was eight – still in his undies but now wearing socks, he was so enthralled by James Brown that he was doing his best to impersonate the Godfather of Soul at family gatherings. A year later, another TV promo – this time for Cadillac Records – truly brought him into the belly of the blues through actor Columbus Short’s depiction of Little Walter.

“I was like…I like that!” Harrell says. “‘I wanna play harmonica!’

“My mama took me to Matt’s Music in Monroe and bought me a C and B-flat. And me bein’ a kid, I was dumfounded how to play. People would tell me I had to learn about cuppin’ and bendin’, but I didn’t care about that stuff. I just liked the sound it made. I tried to play Little Walter songs, and people enjoyed it for some reason, sayin’ I had potential. But I gave it up.”

Three years later – in 2011 – his life began to change for the better when he decided to try his hand at guitar. “I told my mom, and she said okay,” he remembers. “I told my father’s father, Ezekiel Harrell, and he said: ‘I’ll get you a guitar for Christmas. I’ll go to the pawn shop and get you one.’

“Christmas comes around and he buys me a really beat-up Synsonic Pro Series model, which is a really, really, really cheap off-brand model. And he bought the wrong amp…a bass amp…to go with it. But I was still happy as hell when I got my hands on that guitar. And, believe it or not, I still have it!”

His second axe was a First Act acoustic that his mom picked up a few days later for $60 at Walmart.

“I played on ‘em, but didn’t know anything about tunin’,” DKieran admits. “I’m playin’ with all this confidence and stuff, and my mom says: ‘You know, you’d sound good if you had lessons.’ I said: ‘Whatcha mean? That sounds good to me!’

“She says: ‘Well, I think you gotta tune it,’ and I just blew that off, playin’ all outta key. It was horrible! My stepfather has videos of me playin’ at family functions. I told him: ‘Delete it…you’re gonna ruin my career.’ But he was like: ‘No, man! I can’t. It shows the potential that you had at that time and the big difference of where you are now and where you started.’”

Fast forward to 2013 and Harrell finally bought himself a tuner along with five sets of strings, which led to even more problems. “For the life of me,” he says, “I thought putting strings on a guitar was the most difficult thing anyone could do. I used to have a stroke tryin’ to do it. I’d put ‘em in the holes and wind and wind and wind until the string broke, not understanding that there was only a certain amount of tension you needed to get it to be in tune and to get the sound that you wanted.”

At the time, DKieran was cutting the lawns of Grandpa JoJo, one of his mom’s co-workers, and one of his neighbors, too, making $20 a pop during the summer. “But I spent it all on more strings,” he admits, “because I kept breakin’ em. I was dyin’ tryin’ to learn how to do it the right way, and finally got the hang of it. And when I did, I told Grandpa JoJo: ‘I don’t need to cut lawns no more. I can put the strings on right myself’ – and he started laughin’.”

At that point, Harrell says, “I needed to teach myself how to play-play…how to really get some music out of this thing.”

His initial attempt was to try to cop licks off of John Lee Hooker, which was a total failure. Unbeknownst to D.K., Hooker usually tuned down his guitar to open-G while he was trying to copy him in standard E tuning. “I’d be watchin’ John Lee’s fingers playin’ ‘Boom Boom’ and his sound would be different than my sound,” he admits. “It’s awfully hard to find the notes playin’ like that.”

He didn’t understand the error of his ways until a couple of years ago, when another musician finally clued him in.

DKieran says he’s always been a loner. He always carried a lot of weight and has been easy to pick on during childhood. It didn’t help that Harrell was pretty flamboyant, doing splits at a high school pep rally, when he impersonated James Brown with a couple of friends – his hair in a tall perm, doing splits, high-pitched screams and more — after the release of Get on Up, the biopic starring Chadwick Bozeman.

“To show you how judgmental teenagers are,” he says, “they thought I was gay…several people said: ‘D.K.’s gay.’ I’m like ‘no, no, no, I’m not!’ They said: ‘Oh, yes, you are…’cause you got your hair like that!’ I said: ‘It don’t make sense! I’m pretty sure your grandfather had hair like this at one time!’

“What broke my heart wasn’t bein’ called a homosexual, it was the lack of cultural understanding in my own community of young, black Americans. They don’t know anything about how our style was 50, 60, 70 years ago. They just lack the education.”

And even though he’s had multiple girlfriends, women have been especially hard on him, too – twice, in fact, bringing up his weight and telling him to “go kill yourself because no one wants you.” Lately, he’s been comfortable being solitary because most of the ladies in his life have found it impossible to be in a situation where they have to share his love with his unabating affection for music.

“But that’s okay,” DKieran adds, noting he’s concentrating totally on his career right now “because a woman can be a distraction.” He’s also philosophical about the abuse he’s endured, adding: “If a person mistreats you, of course it hurts. But you have to learn to cope with it to the best of your ability to regain your sanity, self-respect and self-awareness and then move forward in life.”

Through it all, he managed to find both solace and joy while teaching himself how to master the six-string by studying YouTube and Vimeo clips of B.B. and other six-string wizards for hours on end and playing along as best he could until he was getting their licks down pat. “There’d be days when I’d be studying John Lee, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy, and I’d get frustrated and so angry,” he remembers. “And my mother would say: ‘Just calm down and take your time. It’ll come to you.

“Then I saw all these other artists…the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, Mud Morganfield…and I said: ‘Well, I can’t play like these people because all of them have my influences’ skills and techniques down. I need to get to the roots, but where do I start?’”

Harrell’s choice was easy…B.B. King.

“For the next seven years, I dedicated myself to studying B.B. King’s style and technique,” he notes. “Everybody wants his vibrato, but what I really wanted was his tone.”

He was 15 when he saw – and met – the master for the first time. After opening his presents at Christmas in 2012 – usually a couple of books and a couple of toys, mom Christal told he had another gift coming that hadn’t arrived yet. The day after New Year’s, she handed him an envelope. “I open it and it’s two tickets to B.B. at the Baton Rouge River Center Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge,” he remembers. “I just exploded!”

A seminal moment in his life, he says, “I had on my grandfather’s brown leather jacket, light green/gray long-sleeve shirt and black jeans. And I had my hair combed into a conk back then, too, ‘cause I liked the way B.B.’s hair looked on those 1950s album covers. We sat in Row S in the orchestra pit, and Lil’ Ray and Tyree Neal (Kenny’s brother and nephew) opened the show — and I was a little disrespectful.

“‘That’s enough of that,’ I said. ‘Bring on B.B.’ But my mama said: ‘Boy, just shut up!’

“Twenty or 30 minutes later, (trumpet player/emcee) Boogaloo Bolden gets on the mic and says: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the world’s greatest blues singer…B…B…King!’” D.K. notes, recounting the lineup: Stanley Abernathy on trumpet, Walter Rodney King on sax, Ernest Van Trease on keys, Charlie “Tuna” Dennis on guitar, Reggie Richards on bass and Coleman on drums.

“I remember it like it was yesterday, and B.B. was rockin’ that night! When the show was over, I asked my mama if she wanted to go down and try to meet him. But she doesn’t like crowds. She said: ‘No…but you can.’

“I pushed my way to the front, and I went ‘Mr. King, Mr. King…’ — and felt butterflies build up in my stomach real fast – ‘I was the young man who was shoutin’ at you during intermission…’

“‘Yeah, I saw you out there…’”

“‘I love you…’ ‘I love you, too, and I really appreciate it…’”

“’And I wanna be just like you…’”

“He shook my hand, handed me a pick and we said good night. I ran up the ramp to get outside, and as soon as I hit the door, I cried and cried and cried.”

A few months later, Christal and DKieran made a three-hour pilgrimage to the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola. Coincidentally, it was the same day that B.B. entered hospice care in Las Vegas. The center was deserted except for its director, Robert Terrell. “I told him I was tryin’ to learn how to play like B.B.,” D.K. remembers, “and showed him a video on my mom’s iPhone. ‘You got potential,’ he said. ‘You got that vibrato down. Here’s my card.’

“I won’t lie…it was bad out of tune…but he encouraged me!”

From that day onward, Harrell says, he downloaded every B.B. King video he could find of him in action between 1968 to the time of his death in order to study his hand movement, equipment and tone. It became a labor-turned-obsession that eventually gave him the same warmth and intensity of his idol along with a voice that’s truly his own.

The key, he says, is – like B.B. – to make the guitar do the singing “because it gives you the ability to take advantage of time and space. Like Albert and Freddie King, Sonny Boy Williamson…their instruments had voices of their own…like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson…they were very melodic and they didn’t have to play fast to be that way.

“There are a lot of guitar players today who (are playing a million notes) and thinking that’s melodic – and that’s okay. But to me, all they’re doin’ is showin’ off. But you’ve gotta have tone when you hit those notes to make people cry.

“It’s somethin’ I’ve experienced on multiple occasions where I’ve just gotten on stage and played with joy. People come up to me cryin’ and tell me that was ‘the most beautiful thing I’ve heard.’ They’re tears of joy, but I feel pain because I don’t like to make ‘em cry.”

It’s an event that Harrell felt for the first time four years ago when he was at home on the sofa next to his mom a few months before he even played a gig. He playing a slow-blues backing track, when his Christal started weeping. “‘How can you do that?’ she asked. ‘How can you teach yourself to do that (express so much emotion) without sayin’ anything?’” he recalls. “’You’ve got a gift, and I don’t know where it comes from. But you got the gift!’”

Shortly thereafter, D.K. and Terrell crossed paths again.

The Harrells were living in Bossier City, an hour west of Ruston, at the time and D.K. had graduated to a black Epiphone ES-345 he named “Deja” after his first girlfriend in an attempt to keep reminding himself “to never lose somebody I love again.

“I dug out Mr. Terrell’s card and sent him some up-to-date videos. A little while later, he called and says: ‘What are you doin’ the first weekend in September?’

“‘Nothin’.’”

“He goes: ‘I want you to come to the B.B. King Day Symposium (at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena)…and I want you to send me a (IRS) 1099 (form) ‘cause you’re gonna get paid!’”

With no car of his own, DKieran rode a Greyhound bus to the gig and met up with Terrell in the lobby of his hotel. Robert insisted he ride along to pick up Walter Riley King – for DKieran, an overwhelming exciting proposition because Walter was B.B.’s nephew.

From that date — Sept. 5, 2019 — to today, Harrell’s life has never been the same.

The festivities began with a discussion keynoted by revered producer/composer/author Benjamin Wright about the British invasion and its effects on the blues. Harrell’s debut as a bluesman – and first public appearance ever – came shortly thereafter in a lineup that included Teeny Tucker, Lil’ Ray, Walter, Jimmy Mayes, Coleman, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and others. And Eric Clapton was supposed to be there, too, but couldn’t make it.

As special as that was, for D.K., things got even better.

“I’m sittin’ there and I see ‘em bringin’ up this guitar case and hand it to Lil’ Ray,” he remembers. “I said: ‘Ray, you already got two guitars out…what’s this third case?’ He says: ‘Well, today’s your day! You’re gonna play Lucille!’

“He hands me the guitar, and a photographer took this picture of me holdin’ Lucille right before I started cryin’. Honestly, the reason I was cryin’ was that I was thinkin’ about all the bad things that had been said about me in the past.”

The pain of that moment quickly passed. Harrell soared into action that afternoon and has never looked back, and he’s built momentum ever since. Thanks to the management of the late Dan Ferguson – who passed just a few weeks prior to this interview, he got to play at B.B. King’s on Beale Street in Memphis, where he’s built a strong friendship with B.B.’s granddaughter, Crystal.

“I played there on April 23, 2021, the day before my birthday,” he notes. “’You play just like my grandfather,’ she told me, ‘and there’s tears in my eyes. You look and even act just like him, too.’ She’s beautiful people, and we’ve been in contact ever since.”

Other decent gigs followed, and he subsequently was chosen to represent the Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola’s representative in the 2022 International Blues Challenge, where he finished the band competition in third place behind The Wacky Jugs, an ensemble from France, and CROS, a group from Arizona fronted by former Lucky Peterson and James Cotton bassist Charles Mack.

Through it all, Harrell has always been a hard worker. His grass-cutting career is far behind him, but he’s always held day jobs prior to the release of his first CD a few months ago. Beginning at age 13, he worked alongside his cousins during the summer at their company, Hills Brothers Lumber, cutting wood from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. and making $20 a day – backbreaking labor, he says, but important work because many folks in the area are so poor they rely on fireplaces and wood stoves in winter to keep the chill at bay.

“I thought that was a lotta money,” he jokes. “’This is gonna add up – and I’m helpin’ the people, too!’”

After graduating high school, he did taxes for a financial company for a while before enrolling into Louisiana Delta Community College in Monroe, where, he admits, “my heart wasn’t in it…I just gave it a shot.” Then he spent two years toiling for a telecommunications company before moving on to Quest Diagnostics, the medical testing firm, where he worked the phones scheduling diabetic screenings and bone-density scans for senior citizens.

He left that job last year when trying to resolve his own medical issues…a pinched nerve in his neck that’s improved considerably but still remains a little problematic, robbing him of a little less feeling in his left hand than he had in the past.

“Doctors told me it was from my guitar bein’ heavy,” D.K. says, “and they told me I’d have to play a smaller guitar. I told ‘em I’ll be damned if I ever play a smaller guitar ‘cause I can’t get the same sound out of a (Gibson) 339 that I get out of my 355. But I’m gettin’ better, so I’ll be fine!”

Always a go-getter, Harrell attempted to secure some festival dates last year by contacting Hill Country bluesman Damion “Yella P” Pearson, who partners with Cameron Kimbrough in the duo, Memphissippi Sounds. Pearson subsequently hooked him up with Michael Kinsman, a longtime promoter of the San Diego Blues Festival and other major events.

Kinsman was no longer in that side of the business, but met with D.K. and expressed a desire to help him fulfill another dream: to record a CD, saying he’d  reach out to Jim Pugh, the keyboard player who founded Little Village Foundation, a 503c non-profit set up to produce albums for artists who’ve been missing out in the exposure they deserve.

Months passed and DKieran was about to leave to make his international debut at the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival in Caxias do Sul, Brazil, when he called Coleman – who was already in the LVF stable as a member of group Silent Partners. “I told Tony: ‘I’m stressed. I’ve been doin’ this stuff for three years, and everybody’s tellin’ me I need a record. He goes: ‘Man, stop complainin’! You want a record? Okay…let me talk to Jim. We’ll talk when you get back.’”

Fortunately, Pugh was already well-aware of Harrell’s talent after having been in the audience at the IBCs. When D.K. and Tony spoke again, Coleman asked: “What are you doin’ in January?”

“I said: ‘Nothin’…I just have one or two gigs.’’

“’Well, we’re gonna get you on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise. You’ll get to talk to Jim Pugh then and we can all play together, too – and see how it works out.’

“And,” D.K. says proudly, “it worked out well! Jim says: ‘So, you want to make a record…’ and I said: ‘I want to, but if you guys don’t want me to, that’s fine. I’ll just wait…’

“‘No-no-no-no. No!’ he says, ‘That’ll work! We’re gonna make a record…but it’s all about what you want.’

“I told him: ‘I want it to have horns, have strings, and I want my songs to tell stories.’

“He said: ‘Okay, we can make that happen. We’ll do it in March. I’m gonna bring ya to Greaseland Studios in California and Kid Andersen’s gonna produce it.’”

The end result, The Right Man — which debuted in June and has been embedded at the top of the charts ever since – features three Grammy honorees – Pugh, Coleman and Jerry Jemmott in a lineup that includes a six-piece horn section and appearances from Tia Carroll, Lisa Leuschner Andersen, Quique Gomez and Alabama Mike.

“A lot of the other bluesmen my age and a little older were like ‘how the fuck did you get Jerry Jemmott – one of the best bass players ever – on your record?’” Harrell says proudly. “The funny thing is…we pick Jerry up and we’re talkin’ and he’s holdin’ this manila envelope. I’m thinkin’ it’s sheet music. But it’s the new issue of Living Blues that has an article about me!

“He brought it from home for me to sign – and I’m thinkin’ to myself: ‘How in the hell is Jerry Jemmott goin’ to ask me…a nobody…for my signature?’ That just surprised the hell outta me. So I got him and Jim, Kid and Tony to sign my Gibson guitar case. Now that sits in my home ‘cause I don’t want nothin’ to happen to it.

“And what’s really cool is that my record is the first time that Tony and Jerry have ever worked together (despite having about 80 years of combined history between them). They’d met each other, but they’d never done a gig together before either. Tony pointed that out on the first day.”

When they finally stepped into the studio, Jemmott — who played on the original version of B.B.’s “The Thrill Is Gone” – pointed out to D.K. that he was playing the same model Gibson that King had used on the song.

A horn flourish opens the title track, “The Right Man,” prior to Harrell’s stinging, single-note guitar run, which hits like a hurricane before his rich tenor voice addresses his lady: “I know you’re gonna cry when I leave this broken home…keep asking yourself: ‘Why did I wrong the right man?’”

Recorded in one take during their very first session, that song immediately establishes Harrell in the forefront of the blues and sets the tone for the ten emotion-packed originals that follow, beginning with “You’re a Queen,” which sings praise of any woman who carries herself in a regal manner.

“The way I wanted it to go in my head, the bass line was supposed to be the horn part of Casey & the Sunshine Band’s ‘I’m Your Boogie Man,’” he notes. “But Jerry had a better idea and told us a secret: ‘When I play bass, all I do is take a samba and apply it to what I’m doin’.

“‘You listen to “Say a Little Prayer for You,” and that bass line’s a samba. Of course, when I’m playin’ “Look Over Yonder Wall” for Freddie King – it’s all straight blues. But if I’m playin’ anything unique, it’s a samba…even B.B.’s “Why I Play the Blues.” If you go to the four-minute mark, I’m playin’ samba blues.’”

Other high points include “Get These Blues Out of Me” — in which Harrell describes himself sitting at home with nervous jitters before a gig but vowing to sing until he’s hoarse and play with a force that will free him of his inner turmoil, “You’d Be Amazed” – which celebrates the need to do your homework in whatever you attempt in order to succeed, “Leave It at the Door” – which suggests celebrating your successes rather than obsessing about past trouble or failures and “While I’m Young” – which is a moving tribute to his grandfather.

“Everyone keeps tellin’ me the pressure’s really on to follow up on this one,” he admits. Considering DKieran’s work ethic and creativity, however, the future is bright – something that’s amplified because he’s already got an arsenal of several notebooks full of originals to consider for the future with more on the horizon.

A multi-faceted talent with a strong desire to keep this music alive, he serves as the first president of the Ouachita River Blues Society in West Monroe, La., which he launched earlier this year. And he recently signed with the Intrepid Artists Management team, one of the most important booking agencies in the business.

As this story were being finalized, D.K. was about to play the East Side Kings Festival in Austin with upcoming dates at the Bogalusa, King Biscuit and Crescent City festivals, among others, before he sails on the October blues cruise. And his 2024 is already shaping up to be an even busier year ahead.

Check out DKieran Harrell’s music and where he’ll be playing next by visiting his website, www.dkblues.com. You’ll be glad you did!