Burrell was born in Grants Pass, Oregon, the son of Sheri Rose (née Hauck), a teacher, and Gary Gerald Burrell (1940–1989), a family therapist. He is mostly of English and German descent. According to the television series "Finding Your Roots", Burrell is also of African descent through his great-great-grandmother Susanna Weeks (the daughter of white slave-owner Colonel Dudley Byron Mask and 13-year-old slave girl Penelope "Nellie" Ellender Mask), who was a former slave from Tennessee and became a homesteader in Oregon. Her son George Washington Weeks would eventually pass for white. Burrell grew up in the small southern Oregon town of Applegate, near the California border.