Harris considered it very significant that he was born on Abraham Lincoln's birthday in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. He studied piano with his mother, and later clarinet. Formally, he studied at the University of California at Berkeley.
At the recommendation of Aaron Copland, Harris studied in Paris from 1926 to 1929 with Nadia Boulanger, who also taught such American composers as Walter Piston, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, and Philip Glass.
Serge Koussevitzky championed Harris's Symphony No. 1, "1933", and it became the first American Symphony ever recorded on LP, with Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Since 1933, Harris taught at Mills College, and his students included William Schuman and Peter Schickele (of P. D. Q. Bach fame).
His Symphony No. 3, written in 1938, joined the American repetoire during the same era as works by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. The first edition of Kent Kennan Wheeler's The Technique of Orchestration quotes three passages from this Symphony, to illustrate good orchestral writing for cello, timpani and vibraphone, respectively. The book quotes no other Harris Symphonies.
Harris wrote fourteen other symphonies. He was a prolific choral composer, but wrote no operas.
His music, while often abstract, is known for its optimistic, American tone. Musicologist John Canarina describes the "Harris style" as "exuberant horn passages and timpani ostinatos."
Other notable works by Harris include: