TRUE STORIES : Rosalie Sorrels Has Led the Kind of Life That Lends Itself to Her Tough and Crusty Music

Rosalie Sorrels has led the kind of life that lends itself to being mythologized, perhaps because some of the fundamental currents and contradictions in American life have been played out so vividly in her own.

At 58, the woman from Idaho has been a presence on the folk music scene for nearly 30 years, singing songs, telling tales and releasing 17 albums. Hers is a story of freewheeling mobility, but also of a desire to be firmly rooted. She stands as a model of self-sufficiency and independence, but she makes it clear that without attachment to family and a community of friends, there would have been no legend to tell.

In conversation, and in performances that seek to string together songs and narrative into a cohesive story, Sorrels is open and plain-spoken--qualities that we like to associate with the idealized heroes of the pioneer past.

Answering questions over the phone from a tour stop in Florida last week, she had the weathered, almost weary quality of someone who has seen too much of life to effervesce or to put a shine on her talk for public consumption. While Sorrels speaks gently, one detects a grain of crusty toughness in her voice. Together with a sense of humor (she often lets go with a low “heh-heh-heh,” usually directed at herself), that tough and crusty streak probably has helped her get through personal difficulties while sustaining a performing career in a grass-roots art form that brings no wide fame and very little profit.

Certainly Sorrels’ crusty streak has helped make her a memorable singer. Her voice is clear, with the capacity for delightful sweetness. But that touch of rawness, like the rawness you hear in Bonnie Raitt, enables her to be an affecting voice of experience as well as a pleasing voice of pure musical charm.

Sorrels’ plain-spoken approach is not calculated to be easy on a listener. She deals in truthful stories that are as often harsh and painful as they are endearing and sentimental.

Take her recent album, “Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House,” one of two that she released in 1991. Sorrels ties together pieces as diverse as a homespun, but disquieting, a cappella reading of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” a prose narration from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” a poem by William Butler Yeats, and her own achingly beautiful lament for her dead son, “Sing Like the Rain (Last Song for David”). It all plays out like an hourlong philosophical essay or meditation on the daunting business of bearing and raising children.

In a stunning written introduction to the album that is a sometimes sardonic but mostly harrowing plea for the preservation of abortion rights and the promotion of children’s well-being, Sorrels antes up all of her personal stakes in the issues at hand.

Her telegraphic prose chronicles a botched, illegal abortion at 16 (“a cervical puncture with a surgical tool . . . delivered by some weird old half-drunk lady called a midwife . . . just a lot of pain and blood and panic . . .”). The tale continues with other painful snapshots from her life. An unwed mother at 17, giving up her firstborn for adoption, and still feeling the ache of that loss 40 years later. A marriage at 19, and the birth of five more children before a divorce at 33, followed by single parenthood and a scramble to earn a living for her family.

And, finally, a struggle to cope with the suicide of one son and the frequent imprisonment of another. “I no longer wallow in grief and guilt,” Sorrels writes. “I really know I did the best I could,” and that others in similar circumstances have had it much harder.

That confessional introduction isn’t an overview of the album, but is a starting point for its meditation on larger issues of morality and social policy. The question at its core: Why don’t we care enough for our children to guarantee them all a decent chance at a good life? On a more intimate level, “Be Careful” makes a listener consider just how demanding and risky an enterprise parenthood is.

“I loved having children, and I would never tell anybody who wanted to have them that they shouldn’t,” Sorrels said, when asked whether prospective parents might not come away from the album with all their fears multiplied. “But babies shouldn’t be born if they’re not wanted.”

Sorrels said she first spoke publicly about her teen-aged pregnancies in the early ‘70s when national debate was raging over the hallmark abortion rights case, Roe vs. Wade. She decided to tell her story again on “Be Careful” because, “I could see that Roe was going to come in for some heavy damage, and I wanted to argue, I wanted a place to talk about it.”

Proponents of an abortion ban “pretend that what happened in the ‘50s was happy days. It wasn’t like that at all. It was just dreadful,” Sorrels said. “There were a lot of girls and boys who got married because they were made to. They didn’t really know or like each other, and it led to a lot of abused children. They want to go back to that, and it’s insane.”

Projecting her own horror story about illegal abortion into the debate 20 years ago “was very hard,” Sorrels said. “A lot of people don’t want to speak up. They’re ashamed, or they don’t want to upset their family. It did interfere with my work and with my life. My mother was furious, and she’s furious again. She didn’t want me to talk about it.”

As a sort of bookend to “Be Careful” and its often dark vision, Sorrels offered another release in 1991, “Report From Grimes Creek.” Mainly about the sustaining power of home and family, the album contains a series of family portraits--tales about her parents and grandparents, who lived with an equal affinity for the land and for books, and about the place where she now lives, a creek-side homestead of logs and bricks that her father built by hand.

The album is no idyll, though. Along with funny, warm remembrances, Sorrels conjures moments of pain, such as the time when she was 14 and she asked her mother why she didn’t bail out of a difficult marriage.

“If you just make it sweet, it doesn’t seem real,” Sorrels said. “It’s not rich enough if you don’t put in the hard parts.”

In folkie myth, Sorrels has been cast as a heroic prototype of the strong, independent, self-sustaining woman. Instead of staying trapped in a terrible marriage, the story goes, she packed up her kids, left her husband, and pluckily set out to become a traveling folk singer who could double as a full-time mom--sort of a campfire version of the Partridge Family.

(Nanci Griffith, the fine singer-songwriter from Texas who plays the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano next week, embroidered upon the myth a few years ago by recording a rollicking tribute to Sorrels called “Ford Econoline,” which specifically described Sorrels as “a living legend.”)

While that is the basic shape of what happened, Sorrels says “the hard parts” tend to be omitted in such a thumbnail retelling.

“A lot of people think I got in the car one day and went out to be a folk singer. That’s absurd. I don’t like it to seem that simple, because it really wasn’t.”

Sorrels didn’t light out for the territories with a Huck Finn-like zest for adventure (the impression one gets from the Griffith song) but with a good measure of desperation.

“It took me four years to convince myself” to leave her husband, she said. “Basically I was to the point where I was waking up every day thinking that it’d be easier to jump off of something or in front of something, and that’s not tolerable.”

Rather than driving off to play folk music, Sorrels did a more obvious thing: She sought refuge with her parents.

“I didn’t even think of (music) as a career when I left. I thought I’d go home. But it was too difficult. My mother didn’t want me to live with them. My father, who had always drunk too much, had stopped drinking, and she thought he’d start again if I came around with all those kids and all that pack of trouble.”

Sorrels looked at first for regular day jobs. After finding nothing that could support a family, she turned to folk music, the one field in which she already had credentials.

While raising her family in Salt Lake City, Sorrels had become deeply involved in the local folk scene, promoting concerts by touring singers and teaching a folk music course at the University of Utah with her husband, Jim.

She also had made a name for herself as a collector of traditional Western songs, had sung on the radio, and had gone on brief performing tours. When she left, Sorrels already had two albums to her credit, had recorded a third and had performed at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, the genre’s biggest showcase.

She says she decided to carry on as a folk singer because the first decent job offer she got as a single mother was a $350 invitation to play a concert at the University of Oregon--wondrous money for a singer who says the most she ever has commanded for one performance was $1,500.

Sorrels moved to California, settled in Richmond in the Bay Area, and began to make her way in the folk scene--with, she says, a great deal of help.

“People helped me get jobs, found people to take care of my kids, all kinds of things you couldn’t imagine anyone would do. I’m still astonished at the things they’d do. There was a nice family feeling among all the people who liked that kind of music. It was like belonging to an immense extended family.

“I don’t think I could do it today. I don’t think it exists to that extent. Also, everything cost a lot less then, too.

“Every so often some woman will say, ‘I want to leave my husband and do what you did,’ ” Sorrels added. “I say, ‘Are you sure? Can’t you work it out? Kids really need two parents. It’s really hard to do that by yourself. If you make a kid together, you ought to try not to leave the kid with half a start.’ ”

For Sorrels, the independent life has meant 25 years of crisscrossing the country on the cheap.

“I had some great cars,” she recalled. “I drove a ’49 Buick for a while during the 1970s. You find that if you have a car that’s great and that’s old, a lot of people who love old cars will help you out” with repairs when they break down. “I kind of had a network across the country. I drove it about 90,000 miles before my kid totaled it.” Sorrels says a ’67 Dodge van took her the farthest: 350,000 miles.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that when Sorrels got her shot at major label recognition in the early ‘70s, she called the album “Traveling Lady.”

“It got a lot of national attention,” she said. After that album, for Sire/Polydor, “they began to talk about getting a producer (for her next album), the one who did ‘Midnight at the Oasis’ (the Maria Muldaur hit). Whatever attracted them to you, they would immediately try to get you to stop and do whatever was selling.”

In any case, Sorrels says her chance for a higher profile was fleeting. “Right after that album, I had a big disaster in my life, a family problem, and I went home to deal with it.” She coped with her at-home problems, and the big record companies went looking for other prospects.

She doesn’t sound as if she minds that missed chance at the mainstream. Her artistic approach, with its emphasis on dramatic spoken pieces and a cappella singing, doesn’t fit any concept of popular folk. “I never came here to be a rock ‘n’ roll star or a hit sensation,” she said. “I never had such visions.”

She has kept up a fairly steady stream of releases on such independent, folk-oriented labels as Philo, Flying Fish and her current company, Green Linnet. Besides “Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House” (originally released in 1990 on Aural Tradition, a Canadian label) and “Report From Grimes Creek,” Green Linnet has just issued “. . .Then Came the Children,” a live album drawn from a 1984 concert.

It’s clear from “Grimes Creek,” her most recent studio album, that staying rooted is now the most prominent theme in Sorrels’ life.

“Some people think of ‘Traveling Lady’ as my signature song, but I’ve gotten so fond of the place I’m in that it’s kind of a wrongheaded signature song,” she said. That place--the rural house her father built--was only a summer home when she was a girl, but later her parents installed electricity and running water, making it their full-time residence in the years before her father’s death in 1971.

Sorrels moved into the house in 1984 to help her mother, Nancy Stringfellow, a writer whose striking prose is featured in several readings on the album. Stringfellow subsequently had to leave for a city apartment after it became hard for her to get around the house in the woods. Her daughter stayed on at Grimes Creek.

“I didn’t expect to go back, but I feel very lucky to have gone back,” Sorrels said of her return to the family homestead after she had turned 50. “One of the things that kept me together when I was on the road was my strong tie to it. I felt as long as it was there I could get through anything.”

She would like to take time off to stay home and complete a work in progress, a one-woman theatrical piece based on the life of her friend Malvina Reynolds, a social activist and writer of the folk standard “What Have They Done to the Rain?”

“I went on tour with her the last year she was alive (Reynolds died in 1978, when she was 77), and I watched her come to the height of her power,” Sorrels said. “I watched her do things that galvanized people into action. She was an amazing kind of transformer when she got on stage.”

Sorrels hopes to get a grant to complete her theatrical piece. Meanwhile, she continues traveling the grass-roots circuit of small folk society gatherings (like her concert Saturday for “The Living Tradition” series in Anaheim), acoustic music clubs (she’ll play Sunday at McCabe’s in Santa Monica), and folk festivals.

“I can’t make enough money to stay home,” she said. “I’ve never topped $10,000” in annual income. “I never paid much attention to the money. I’d like things to be easier, and money would make it easier. But I’m a terrible businesswoman. I once asked one of the record companies why they were cheating me. They said, ‘You’re a terrible businesswoman, Rosalie, and it’s easy.’ ”

Sorrels’ fund of hard-won experience continues to grow. She said she was devastated last week when a chance for her son’s parole fell through. The son, Kevin, has been in prison in Idaho for four years on charges of burglary and forgery, Sorrels said. For six months, she said, she tried to set up a job and a supervised living arrangement for him in California. Instead, she was told belatedly by an official that the plan never had a chance of being accepted.

“It’s been making me crazy,” Sorrels said. “I would like to kick (the parole official) in the throat, and I’m not a violent woman. My son could have submitted another plan (to serve his parole in Idaho) and be out by now. He’s so discouraged.”

Sorrels said her three daughters “are doing great. My daughters seem to live with falling back and regrouping better than my sons.”

Sorrels has had to do some regrouping too. Three years ago she suffered a cerebral aneurysm at home in Idaho. “I’d have died if my daughter hadn’t been there” to drive her to an emergency clinic. “They shaved off every lick of my hair and cut my head open. They told my children I was going to die. Everything seems like a bonus now.”

Since the illness, she said, “I’ve had to work harder to remember” the writings she wants to use in her concerts as spoken narratives. “I used to just look at something and I’d know it.

“But maybe that’s just because I’m almost 60,” she added with a laugh.

Running through Sorrels’ conversation is a deep concern about weakening threads of attachment between parents and their children, between the old and the young, between traveling folk and the strangers they might need to help them on the road.

“I feel something went terribly askew and everybody’s afraid of strangers now, and that fear fosters meanness,” she said, comparing the ‘80s and ‘90s to the ‘60s.

“There’s a poverty of spirit, a sense that ‘I can’t do anything to help because it’s going to hurt me or cost me.’ There’s a lack of kindness and desire to connect. It seems too hard for a lot of people to try, and they just have to work on that. I don’t think you can fix it right away.”

But Sorrels hasn’t given up hope that those tears in the social fabric can one day be patched.

“I’m an optimist,” she said, “and I personally believe we have a very good chance right now. In lyrics of contemporary songs, and in the eyes of the young people who want to reach out and have stories told to them, I see a real sense of longing and wanting to connect. I think it’s possible, and I want to have a part in it.”

For herself, Sorrels doesn’t ask for more than she already has.

“I really love my life. I get to live in a house my father built, and my children all like me, and I get to do something I’m interested in doing. I think that’s a remarkable success story. I can’t imagine anything to complain about, except I’d like other people to have that feeling too.”

Who: Rosalie Sorrels.

When: Saturday, Feb. 8, at 8 p.m.

Where: The Anaheim Cultural Arts Center, 931 N. Harbor Blvd.

Whereabouts: Take the Riverside Freeway to the Harbor Boulevard exit and go south, or the Santa Ana Freeway to the Harbor Boulevard exit and go north. The Cultural Arts Center is between La Palma Avenue and La Verne Street.

Wherewithal: $10.

Where to call: (714) 638-1466 or (213) 835-4554. Reservations recommended.