For nearly 20 years, Ben Harper has been crafting an inspired, versatile mix of plugged-in soul, blues, funk and roots-rock.

So, it will be interesting to hear how his body of work translates to an unplugged format on his first-ever solo-acoustic tour, which comes to the Michigan Theater on Wednesday. The show has been sold out for weeks.

On this tour, Harper is giving the stripped-down treatment to songs that span his career, from his 1994 debut, “Welcome to the Cruel World” to his 2011 album, “Give Till It’s Gone”—a disc that Rolling Stone described as “his most searingly personal album” and “a rare combination of resilience and sadness, with plenty of room left over.”

Harper spent the 1990s as a cult artist before finding a mainstream audience in the last decade or so. In 2005, he received Grammy Awards for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for his single “11th Commandment” and for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album for “There Will Be A Light,” the album he made with the Blind Boys of Alabama.

His mid-to-late-’00 studio albums—“Both Sides of the Gun” (‘06), “Lifeline” (‘07) and “White Lies for Dark Times” (‘09)—all debuted in the Top 10 of The Billboard 200. In ‘10, Harper also formed Fistful of Mercy with Dhani Harrison (George Harrison’s son) and Joseph Arthur, and the trio released the album “As I Call You Down.”

“Give Til It’s Gone” received stellar reviews. “The heartbreak on ‘Give Till It’s Gone’ is savage and genuine,’ wrote Entertainment Weekly, which gave the disc an “A -“ grade. Spin swooned over the “fuzz-funky ‘Spilling Faith’” and the “soul-punk blast” of “Clearly Severely,” and NoDepression.com enthused that “the songs punch along with purpose, alternating between searing stadium anthems and Harper’s devastatingly heartrending ballads.”

Members of Harper’s band, the Relentless7, co-wrote much of the material and played on the album—which also featured guests Ringo Starr and Jackson Browne—but Harper decided to release the disc just under his own name.

Since it was his final release of a 10-record deal that he’d signed with Virgin back on the ‘90s, some saw that as Harper’s way of bringing one chapter of his career to a close and starting another—after having released his previous several albums under band monikers: Ben Harper and the Relentless7, or Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals.

Harper recently confirmed as much when he told the Vancouver Sun that things were “immeasurably different” than they were 10 albums ago. “And it’s so exciting.”

Harper recently recorded a new duo album with blues-harmonica poobah Charlie Musselwhite, titled “Get Up,” which is slated for release in January 2013 on the Concord label. “It is blues the way blues is supposed to sound and feel from where I sit. It’s definitely a unique deal and it leaves room for growth,” Harper told the Sun.

The Musselwhite project is one of many collaborations with iconic artists that Harper has engaged in over the years. In addition to the Blind Boys project, his other confabs were with such artists as Taj Mahal, Solomon Burke and his pal Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.

Harper grew up in Southern California and spent many many hours in his grandparents’ music shop / museum, where he became immersed in the folk and blues styles that would later form two of the pillars of his own musical mix. His family urged him to explore his creative impulses at an early age: he began playing the guitar at age seven, and continued to develop his own musical sensibilities over the next dozen-plus years, while repairing and restoring guitars in his grandparents' shop.

Then, when Harper was 20 years old, Mahal, a regular at the shop, began to mentor Harper and took him out on the road.

Harper is also known for his wicked lap-steel playing, and he’s not shy about flaunting his steel chops, onstage and on record.

“From the second I heard the lap steel guitar….I was into it,” he told RevoltInStyle.com. “There are pictures of me sitting around my parents’ music store playing. People would come in and play, because we were the kind of store that would have lap steels. The first time I ever heard it I knew I had to learn it. I had to get me some of that. It sat there calling my name.”

Last year, Harper released a song, “Rock n’ Roll is Free,” which prompted some discussion about the financial value of music, given that CD sales have been in a steady, steep decline for more than a decade, as more and more music consumers have turned to digital downloading or online subscription services. But he says he wasn’t necessarily thinking about it from that perspective when he wrote it.

“When I wrote it, it was more about rock ’n’ roll having more freedom now than before because it’s not confined by industry standards or rules,” Harper told the Sun. “But then it was received in different ways and some figured I meant monetarily free.

“So I sort of defended it on that basis as well. The impetus for the song is just the freedom that I feel being off a record label and the freedom music now has, travelling across the world at the press of a button.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.