"The blues ain’t got no color." That was the late John Lee Hooker’s pat response to questions about the veracity of white blues artists. Yet there’s been a continued lightening of the music since the Rolling Stones and John Mayall began to emulate their Chicago heroes, performers like Muddy Waters and J.B. Lenoir. And not only in the faces that have taken the blues to the fore, like Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jonny Lang, and Susan Tedeschi. Blues songwriting is, with few exceptions, simply not the candid, colorful, deeply personal art it once was.

Otis Taylor and Corey Harris are among the exceptions. These are veteran musicians whose recordings have an extraordinary embrace of the past and present and who are now compelling purist listeners and lesser performers to consider their enlightened view of the genre’s future. Both are from Colorado. Harris was born there, but his music came of age in Cameroon and New Orleans. He plays the House of Blues this Friday, touring behind his inventive, roots-conscious Downhome Sophisticate (Rounder). Taylor has spent most of his 53 years in the Rocky Mountain State but makes music as potent as that of the brooding Delta masters. Last month he traveled to Memphis to play the Blues Foundation’s annual W.C. Handy Awards program and left with the Best New Artist statue.

He also played two nights on Beale Street at the Blues City Café. Plucking songs from last year’s White African and his new Respect the Dead (both on Northernblues), Taylor came off like a baseball-cap-wearing psychedelic shaman as he fronted his drumless band. As he does on CD, he built the songs up from riffs that reflect the spare bones of Hooker’s solo performances or African string-instrument rhythms. He created a drone by using an open D/G tuning, digital delay, and a right-hand technique that blends picking, frailing, and strumming, generating a mesmerizing undertow for numbers like "Hands on Your Stomach" and "32nd Time"; they were made more hypnotic by the spare propulsion of his producer Kenny Passarelli’s bass and Eddie Turner’s mad, effects-soaked clouds of lead guitar.

It’s more than Taylor’s match of old-school blues and modern sonics that makes his songs significant. His lyrics dig into the heart of the African-American experience. "Hands on Your Stomach," like Respect the Dead’s opener, "Ten Million Slaves," reaches back to the Motherland; "32nd Time" is a Freedom Rider saga. But he also draws from his own experiences to create gritty, barked, first-person narratives of social injustice and boiling-point passions. "Black Witch," a dark love story of violence, deceit, and racism that ends in the lifelong jailing of a black man whose wife was also a white man’s mistress, is based on a true tale his father told him. And the lynching in "My Soul’s in Louisiana," from White African, is part of his own family history.

Harris’s new album is a continuation of the work he began with his electric 5X5 Band on 1999’s ambitious Greens from the Garden (Alligator), an often-playful catalogue of African-American styles. Downhome Sophisticate is more sprawling but still fueled by Harris’s topical writing, Delta-inspired guitar, and full-bodied voice. He connects the lines of tradition between Africa and the States by fusing musical elements. His lightning-strike anti-war ballad "Fire" sews a powerful, melismatic African vocal melody and guitar rhythm to a Mississippi fife-and-drum-band beat, then ups the ante with a ration of psychedelic slide. He draws upon samba and bossa nova to explore Afro-Latin connections; he dives into funk to turn Mississippi Fred McDowell’s "Money on My Mind" into a twisted acid trip. There’s also "Santoro," a narrative about racial profiling and police harassment, and the title track, the pair being among the best blues/hip-hop hybrids since Arrested Development’s "Tennessee."

Downhome Sophisticate and Greens from the Garden do more than celebrate African-American culture. Both CDs announce Harris’s emancipation from the blues-record business, where he’s spent a half-dozen years cutting mostly acoustic albums. Blues labels have a tendency to impose idiomatic restrictions on artists, preferring that they make guitar-driven albums of Chicago or country blues. That’s what has sold to the genre’s increasingly white audience since the ’60s.

Harris and Taylor, however, make it clear that they’re interested in listening to their inner voices. And by following their own visions, they’re putting the black — and the artistry — back into the blues.

Corey Harris and the 5X5 Band play the House of Blues, in Harvard Square, this Friday, June 14, at 10 p.m. Call (617) 491-BLUE.