MICHELLE SHOCKED: "Arkansas Traveler" (Alive/Mercury).
***The story of 30-year-old Michelle Shocked is the stuff folk music legends are made of. Raised in a Mormon family of eight children in east Texas, she ran away from home at age 14, saw the world and found a poet's heart.
She was discovered later at the Kerrville Folk Festival, strumming her guitar and spilling her soul to anyone who'd listen.
Someone did. The eclectic "Texas Campfire Tapes," recorded at that same festival on a Sony Walkman with crickets chirping in the background, was released on a major record label in 1987 and marked the genesis of a new voice in the classic troubadour tradition: pure, uncompromising, lyrically brilliant.
The subsequent studio-recorded "Short, Sharp, Shocked" in 1988 was equally brilliant, though somewhat ignored in the media crush to proclaim Tracy Chapman the new queen of folk.
Then came 1990's "Captain Swing," as in porch swing, Texas swing, big band swing, New Orleans swing. The brassy, dancey sound caught even her most ardent supporters off guard. It was far more eccentric than it was political. Reviews were mixed, at best.
Now comes "Arkansas Traveler," Shocked's tribute to the blackface tradition. This time, Shocked uses music to argue that whites and blacks who performed in blackface during the 1800s are the founders of today's popular music, and that musicians who do not acknowledge this tradition are unfairly exploiting it.
As she told the Dallas Morning News, "You can tell a story a hundred different ways. The way I'm trying to tell the story is that this music was as much a black invention as a white one...
"I am making the argument that our popular culture today - all styles, no matter what genre - is still the same expression that was the most popular entertainment 100 years ago - blackface minstrelsy. It's all connected."
To prove her point, she hooked up with Doc Watson, Pops Staples of the Staple Singers,, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of the Band, the Red Clay Ramblers, the Hothouse Flowers, Paul Kelly's Messengers, Taj Mahal, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Alison Krauss, Norman and Nancy Blake and others. In all, there were 14 different tradition-minded bands in 13 different towns.
Particularly good is Staples' slithery guitar on "33 RPM Soul" and Doc Watson's playful influence on "Strawberry Jam." Helm lends good harmony to "Secret to a Long Life," which is otherwise disappointing.
Ironically, it's "Come a Long Way," a pure folk ditty recorded with no-name studio musicians, that packs the most powerful punch and serves as a wistful reminder of the cream from the "Short, Sharp, Shocked" material.
Keeping with the precedent she set on "Catain Swing," only two cuts have any obvious political content: the anti-war "Shaking Hands" and the feminist "Prodigal Daughter." Both are exceptional.
Shocked says this album represents the completion of a trilogy that bagan with "Short, Sharp, Shocked" and "Captain Swing."
"Some folks think I keep changing styles," she said. "Naw. I've tried to show where my musical sources come from. I don't know where this road goes from here. I've just tried to explain how I got there."
And she has a pretty good time doing it, too.