“I don’t really see myself as a blues player,” explains Corey Harris from somewhere deep in Mississippi, on his way from New Orleans to Virginia this week, one more leg in the traveling life of a working musician.

Due on South Whidbey this week for a performance at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, Harris is a tough guy to get a hold of, since he’s never at home — wherever that is. The cell phone breaks up, comes through again and Harris admits, “I’m usually perceived as a blues musician but my music has more components to it. I’m from a new generation. The blues is the foundation.”

Harris’ five CDs are, however, usually found in the blues section of music stores. There’s a progression easily heard between his 1995 release “Between Midnight and Day” and 2002’s “Downhome Sophisticate,” which like Harris’ previous album, “Greens From The Garden,” received a four-star rating from Rolling Stone magazine. Several tracks on “Downhome Sophisticate” have obvious contemporary African musical influences, and the single “Black Maria” is a moving paean to the mother continent with a swinging Cuban feel.

“I don’t like to be pigeonholed,” Harris says. “I always had the intent to build on “Between Midnight and Day” and to move forward and play different kinds of music. Marketing yourself as a blues musician just keeps you back.”

Harris’ kind of marketing is the reason small audiences in some out-of-the way places get to see him perform live. He gets airplay on regional and national blues radio shows, but that doesn’t make him too big or too famous to make a trip to Whidbey Island Saturday after he does a Friday-night show in Seattle.

Born in Denver in 1969, Harris began to express himself musically early in life, spontaneously making up songs, banging on the traditional pots and pans, and playing a toy guitar. He took music lessons from age five and learned to read music while studying trumpet. At 12, he picked up the guitar again and was singing and playing in public the next year. He’s busked on city streets all over America as well as in Russia, France and other nations.

He credits the experience of playing on the streets with teaching him how to choose songs that would get people to stop and listen. He got his first real attention in New Orleans playing in front of St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square.

“That’s where the tourists were,” Harris said.

In the early 1990s, he attended Bates College in Maine, where he began to seriously explore his African-American heritage. He traveled to Cameroon twice to study Pidgin “because,” he explained, “if you look at the history of Pidgin, it’s the history of all black people who had to deal with the Middle Passage, in that we had to come up with new ways of talking and expression, to be able to speak about things in the presence of those who had power over us, but also to be able to communicate with people from different parts of the continent.”

Harris is serious, almost academic, about his communication. Asked what the blues are, he launches into a technical description of the musical form and how it allows musicians to play together without rehearsal. He avoids the usual palaver about the depth of feeling induced by the suffering inherent to the slave trade and the experiences of Africans in America.

Harris is among a wave of new artists who emerged in the mid 1990s as part of a general revival of interest in blues music. Amidst the pre-millennial extravagance of that time, he believes that people had a hunger for reality and that they liked the directness of the new blues. But he expressed concern about the downturn in the market over the past 18 months with record labels and booking agents dropping blues artists. But, if making money was the main concern for him and other blues artists, the music might not survive.

“There’s a different intent for blues and jazz artists,” he said. “They know that these genres are not about making hit records. Occasionally it happens with a good song but mostly it’s about making music. They’re realistic.”

Harris has built his unique sound upon the foundation of the blues, but he seems unlikely to be pigeonholed. He’s collaborated with a wide range of musicians from Billy Bragg to Natalie Merchant.

For his show at WICA, Harris plans to be of service to the audience as an entertainer, to play music that people will appreciate. Blues player or not, Harris is clearly a creative artist with a deep knowledge of the music that he is enthusiastic to share.

“I’m trying to represent what my tradition is,” he said, “and then represent my individual self in the contemporary moment. I’m often surprised by the creative process. That keeps it fresh.”

Jonathon Evelegh is filling in for Sue Frause this week.