Hip Hick

To put it bluntly, singer-songwriter Michelle-Shocked comes off as a bit of a hick. What’s more, she’s proud of it.

“Yeah, I am a hick,” she said this week. “I am naive, and I am sincere and it’s wonderfully unfashionable.”

Yet the native of the small east Texas town of Gilmer is currently one of the sensations of the English independent music scene, thanks to her debut album “The Texas Campfire Tapes.”

Shocked makes her local debut opening for Guy Clark tonight at McCabe’s in Santa Monica.

The album, which is being released here by PolyGram records, is certainly the antithesis of slick: It was recorded--crickets, passing trucks and all--by English folk producer Pete Lawrence in a field at the 1986 Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival. And in her songs, which tell of the life as a vagabond and squatter that she’s led since running away from home at age 16, Shocked comes off down-home.

“When I first started going to cosmopolitan cities like New York and Amsterdam, I tried to lose traces of my very rural backwoods upbringing,” said Shocked, who coined her stage name for the benefit of the police who arrested her at a protest outside the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Now in her mid-20s, she says she feels free to expose her roots: “It’s as if ‘The Campfire Tapes’ seems to validate the more country aspects of my background.”

So should one assume that the album’s rawness is contrived “authenticity?”

“The festival is run by volunteer support, and I was working on the crew,” she said. “There’s a group of friends that travel a lot and that’s our rendezvous. We get together and play the songs we’ve written in the past year, and it was in that context that Pete heard me singing.”

In fact, Lawrence only issued the record on his small Cooking Vinyl label after friends of his heard the tape and suggested he release it. Shocked was living as a punked-out squatter in New York when she heard about the proposed album.

“It wasn’t too difficult a decision to make,” said Shocked, who now has a recording contract with a big label (a “real” album made with country producer Pete Anderson has been completed) and lives on a houseboat on the Thames in London. “I was pretty amused that Pete would even suggest that. But I went to England and was completely knocked off my feet. I had no way of anticipating the results of this very innocent recording session.”