It's a long way from playing for spare change on the streets of New Orleans to winning a so-called "genius award" worth half a million bucks.

But it's a journey Corey Harris, who is most easily classified as a blues musician, has handled with aplomb.

"I was shocked," Harris says of his reaction when he learned he was a 2007 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. "I was grateful. I was very thankful. It's gratifying to know that you can be struggling along in your own little corner and people are paying attention. You may not think they're paying attention, but they are."

Harris will be on the campus of Franklin & Marshall College on Saturday. From 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., he will present a clinic on blues performance that is free and open to the public in the Boncheck House Great Room. He and his excellent band will then give a concert Saturday night in the Barshinger Center for Musical Arts as part of the Sound Horizons Concert Series.

Harris, who attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, moved to Napoleonville, La., upon graduation and taught school under the Teach for America program.

He also started performing on the streets of New Orleans, playing the rural blues he had first started to learn while growing up in Denver, Colo.

"It was very challenging because you had to deal with a lot," says Harris, 41, who now lives in Virginia. "There's noise on the street, for one thing. You got a lot of drunk tourists that come in and you've got other musicians on the street. You can't just blow in from out of town and get in the best spot at the best hour of the day and think it's going to be all right."

Harris says his success there led him to believe he could make a living as a musician.

He eventually was signed by Alligator Records, the Chicago blues label, and released his debut album, "Between Midnight and Day," in 1995. The album, a stripped-down affair spotlighting Harris' guitar and voice, included a few originals alongside covers of songs by artists like Elmore James, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton and Mississippi Fred McDowell.

Harris' interpretations of these great Delta blues songs sounded authentic, not academic.

"That album was basically a picture of my repertoire at the time," he says. "That was a small, little snapshot of what I was doing on the street during that time period."

His musical imagination, however, was too expansive to be constrained by a single style of blues music. With each succeeding album, it seems as if he incorporates more and more elements into his original music, drawing from what he's heard in Africa, in Jamaica, in the Caribbean, in New Orleans.

"I always listened to a bunch of different music, all sorts of black music," he says. "My goal from the beginning was to develop it into something different, into something more than just the blues, you know. The blues was like a starting point."

He has frequently traveled to Africa and collaborated with Ali Farka Toure, the late, great guitarist and singer. The two musicians appear together in a Martin Scorcese-directed segment of "The Blues," the 2003 PBS miniseries. Toure also guested on Harris' 2003 album "Mississippi to Mali."

"He taught me a lot," Harris says of Toure, "and some of it I didn't even learn yet, but I'm working on it."

Harris, who says he used some of the money from his MacArthur Fellowship to finance an album with blues harmonica player Phil Wiggins, has released 10 albums.

His latest is "blu.black," which was released last year and features some great reggae-influenced songs. It's a fine addition to an already impressive catalog.

"I want to make original music, but make it so it doesn't sound like I'm trying too hard," Harris says. "I want to do something that sounds natural and is easy on the ear, but at the same time sounds different. I'm attracted to lyrics that talk about present realities, like what's going on with black people in different situations in the world or something to do with history or something to do with relationships.

"The goal is to build a catalog of songs that don't sound like anyone else's catalog."

Corey Harris

Sat. 8 p.m. $10

Barshinger Center

F&M College, 358-4858

www.fandm.edu

Blues Clinic

Sat. 2-4 p.m. Free

Bonchek House Great Room

F&M College