Album Notes

I come from way deep East Texas at the Louisiana line, from the same tiny town as Freddie King, from the same neck of the woods as Leadbelly and Gatemouth and Lightnin and Lemon. We were too poor to own many records, but my family made music at home. My story is a runaway's tale of homelessness, and of being perhaps the last American to receive the mixed blessing of being field recorded. Finally, I'm the only known major label artist to own and publish my complete catalog.
After two years of community college, I put myself through the University of Texas in Austin but the strain led to a little post-grad work in the Baylor Hospital psych ward. This brought me to my senses, and I realized you can be poor anywhere. So I split for San Francisco and New York, then airhitched a ride (airhitch.org) to Paris. In Europe I pursued a masters degree in Street Studies with a focus on pirate radio, squatting, poetry, anti-fascism, feminism, rape, socialism, and Green anti-apartheid punk anti-nuclear anarchist philosophy. It was alright, but I got homesick.
The annual songwriters' gathering at the Kerrville Folk Festival, where I volunteered and hung out with my friends, brought a curious specimen in 1986. An Englishman who said he was a journalist heard me one night out among the campfires, and asked if I would play some songs for his Sony Walkman. But he neglected to mention that he was actually a partner in a brand new British independent record label. I played some songs out there that night, his tape recorder sitting on a log as crickets sang BVs and trucks downshifted, and I told some stories. I didn't know it at the time, but like some of my heroes, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters, I was being 'field recorded.' That tape, made on a Walkman with batteries so weak it ran too quick when played back at normal speed, was aired repeatedly on the BBC.
I was in New York a few months later when my friend came back from Amsterdam with a magazine. Inside was a flexi-disc of 'Who Cares?,' by Michelle Shocked. But I didn't record a song called 'Who Cares?' --I don't even have a song called 'Who Cares!' I played the flexi on a turntable, and sure enough, it was my voice, saying, 'This is my most recent song and it's called...oh, who cares!'
Originally released without my knowledge or permission, the Texas Campfire Tapes, as it was called, became my 'debut' recording. I'd grown up in a tradition of bluegrass and blues and picker-poets, but now I was a British pop phenomenon. I played my very first show at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. Over the next eighteen months, I found myself working for a manager who was also my booking agent, publisher, record label boss, suitor and landlord. Cooking Vinyl was shopping me to major labels, licensing my record around the world, booking gigs, collecting commissions and royalties, shipping me and my guitar C.O.D., while discretely cutting a custom-label deal for itself. It was as if I'd fallen into a new job at the circus getting shot out of a cannon. Despite the disarray, I had a plan.
I risked signing with a major label, Mercury, in an attempt to change the system from within. I turned down the label's advance for the sake of owning my work. And I had a cultural agenda too. I organized my songs into a trilogy of LPs that was meant to show where I'd come from. After my first taste of circus-cannon celebrity, I needed something more substantial than breadcrumbs to mark my way back home.
Part One --Short Sharp Shocked--was a picker-poet album. Part Two --Captain Swing --was blues with an upbeat. Part Three of the trilogy, Arkansas Traveler --conceived before I'd even recorded Short Sharp Shocked --was a tribute to the fiddle tunes I'd played with my dad and brother on mandolin, banjo and such. I pursued the hidden roots of that music, and those old familiar tunes. Writing new lyrics that sounded ancient, I traveled three continents to play with my heroes, peers and a few rank strangers. Pops Staples, Doc Watson, Gatemouth Brown, Jimmie Driftwood, Taj Mahal, and Alison Krauss were part of that adventure. Recorded on steamboats, in barns, log cabins, and even recording studios, Arkansas Traveler was an epic. I had found my way home.
I read somewhere that 11 AM Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I remember thinking, 'If believers in 'brotherly love' can't get together, what chance do the rest of us have?' Living in LA at that time, I went down to South Central, to the West Angeles Church of God in Christ (C.O.G.I. C.), one of LA's largest African-American congregations. Breaching a 20 year estrangement from organized religion on the grounds that the choir was great, I returned each Sunday, inspired by that great vernacular tradition. But I went one Sunday too often. Looking down, I was surprised to see my feet making the altar call that morning. I got saved, and that changed most everything.
I was still a social drinker, and plenty profane. I hadn't begun to pray or read the Bible. I wasn't yet spirit-filled. But I was a bona fide Pentecostal born-again Christian, despite the glaring contradictions of its socially conservative doctrine. I remember quite clearly the Sunday morning that the visiting evangelist stood at the pulpit and preached, to loud approval, that God had created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Or the time the Sunday School teacher explained a woman's lower spiritual consciousness was due to menstrual flow. I was surprised, because how could a church that came up through the oppression of bondage, not recognize bigotry and prejudice in other forms?
Overnight, I had a new artistic direction. I composed a series of prayers, and booked a studio to begin recording a new album. But on the day the sessions began, Mercury balked. Though they did exercise their option for another album, they would release no funds and soon after sent out a cease and desist order, which ended my discussions with other labels. Rand Hoffman, currently head of Business and Legal Affairs at Universal, took me in his office a few weeks later, closed the door, and explained that the label would never properly promote my albums, because, as he put it, I had 'cut too good a deal' for myself. He was trying to force a renegotiation of the master rights I'd protected.
I refused. So from 1993 to 1996, I toured relentlessly. I tallied up 238 performances. It was the only outlet I had, and I was determined to exercise my creativity. The result was a cycle of bleak story-songs called Kind Hearted Woman, sold only at shows. In 1995, I initiated an artist's rights lawsuit, citing a violation of my civil liberties under the 13th Amendment (which prohibits slavery), and I was released from my contract. A second version of Kind Hearted Woman came out a little later on BMG.
By then, I was living in New Orleans. In 1996 I recorded a duet album, Artists Make Lousy Slaves, with Fiachna O'Braonain of Hothouse Flowers. I also wrote a song cycle, yet unrecorded, inspired by collaborations with Allen Toussaint and New Orleans brass bands. During a yearlong sabbatical in 1997, I worked with a grassroots campaign in Louisiana, in a groundbreaking effort against environmental racism. Then, in 1998, I released Good News, recorded with the Annointed Earls, also sold only at shows.
Returning to Los Angeles in 1999, I started another song cycle, inspired by the Spanglish culture of my new neighborhood. And in 2000, I collaborated once again with my longtime road partner, Fiachna O'Braonain, on a millenium cycle of 30 songs. Both cycles are complex, multi-genre concepts that will provide ample material for upcoming releases.
In 2001 I started an independent label, Mighty Sound, and released a second version of Good News, called Deep Natural. In 2002, I separated from my husband of 13 years, and recently, I was divorced. In 2003 I began the reissue campaign for my catalog, beginning with The Texas Campfire Takes and Short Sharp Shocked. By March, I was actively opposing the administration's Iraq invasion and supporting, among others, Code Pink, A.N.S.W.E.R.'s anti-war coalition, and the Dennis Kucinich for President campaign. In October, I traveled to Africa in a delegation with my church for an initiative called Save Africa's Children. And I fell in love again. In January 2004, I hosted a reunion with my mother after a 25-year estrangement. In April 2004 Captain Swing was reissued and now, finally, Arkansas Traveler.
January 2005 is the scheduled release date for my newest studio effort. Tracks (and remixes) will include 'Evacuation Route,' a child's eye view of domestic upheaval, 'Match Burns Twice,' a reminder that you can't keep a good woman down, and '180 Proof,' a blues lament of co-dependence. I sure hope it'll change the world.