Berryhill’s Brand of Folk Stirs Up the Irish : Music: Song about whether to have a baby gives folk music a controversy, as singer was trying to do.

As if Ireland hasn’t had enough problems, locally grown nufolk priestess Cindy Lee Berryhill unwittingly smuggled another one into her ancestral homeland last year. At the time, she had already spent a couple of mostly uneventful months playing her way through the Netherlands, Belgium and Great Britain. Then Berryhill traveled to Belfast to tape a song for a BBC political program.

“I had opened two weeks’ worth of shows in England and Scotland for Christy Moore, and it was great. Then, I’m in Ireland for only 24 hours and I get into this mess,” said a laughing Berryhill in a recent phone call from her latest refuge in Taos, N.M.

“Apparently, BBC radio had been playing my song, ‘Baby (Should I Have the Baby?).’ And there was also an article about me in The (London) Times. Well, Britain’s answer to Phyllis Shafly got wind of this American girl singing songs about abortion, and she started a call-in campaign to get my song off the air. By the time I got to Belfast, it was really a big deal. But I kinda liked it, ‘cause it meant putting controversy back into folk, where it belongs.”

Berryhill’s fans will be glad to hear that the 26-year-old singer-songwriter didn’t drop off the face of the earth. Of course, if she had, Berryhill undoubtedly would have made an indelible imprint wherever she landed.

A few years ago, the graduate of Ramona High School was ubiquitous on the San Diego music scene, accompanying herself on guitar at such clubs as Drowsy Maggie’s and Bodie’s, and occasionally opening shows for the Beat Farmers. Then a demo tape of hers landed at Rhino Records and fame came calling.

In a music world suddenly reinvestigating folk music, Berryhill’s 1987 debut, “Who’s Gonna Save the World?” was a back-to-the-future revelation. On it, Berryhill braided together grass-roots politics, no-frills street musicianship, an arid wit, and a crazy-quilt tilt on serious, frequently very personal subjects. Her 1989 follow-up, “Naked Movie Star,” sealed the deal.

Critics were refreshed by Berryhill’s “trash-acoustic” style. They loved the whip-cracking sarcasm of the first album’s “Damn, Wish I Was a Man” and the darkly ironic portrait of suicide in “She Had Everything.” They reveled in the puckish attack on an American icon in the second record’s “Trump” and the sly, coffeehouse, jazz-folk treatment of the Sex and Motherhood Question in “Baby (Should I Have the Baby?).”

Berryhill’s cross-cultural style invited comparisons to punk minimalist Patti Smith, country-pop songbird Dolly Parton, and even such fictional flakes as Olive Oyl and Maynard G. Krebs. The typewriter jocks made her the scruffy standard-bearer for a merger of punk and folk christened “anti-folk” by its practitioners. And they crowned Berryhill the acid-tongued, ragamuffin queen to nu-folk hit maker Suzanne Vega’s dewy-eyed Joan of Arc.

Berryhill moved to Los Angeles soon after the release of “Who’s Gonna Save the World?” and hasn’t stopped moving since. She has made only occasional visits to San Diego; her last local performance was in May, 1989, at SDSU’s Backdoor.

After intermittent forays to New York City, Berryhill moved from the Big Orange to the Big Apple 2 1/2 years ago. She lived on the Lower East Side, fell in with fellow anti-folkers Kirk Kelly and Roger Manning, and became a fixture on New York City’s downtown folk scene. For a while, she supplemented her steady but unspectacular income from record royalties by working part-time in a bookstore.

Berryhill spent much of 1988 on the road as the opening act for such artists as Billy Bragg, the Smithereens, Marti Jones and Don Dixon. She returned to New York to record “Naked Movie Star”--ironically with Suzanne Vega’s producer, Lenny Kaye, at the controls. After her European escapade, Berryhill returned to New York, but in a few months she was ready for a change. Just before Christmas, Berryhill moved to Taos, where she lives near an Indian pueblo.

“My manager lives here,” she said, “and it seemed like a good place to hang out for a while. But before I left New York, I played with the Indigo Girls at a women’s-movement benefit at a club called the Wetlands. That was really cool. I just finished writing a song about New York. Overall, I’d say it was a great experience.”

It was snowing in Taos as Berryhill spoke, and she waxed wistful when informed of the summerlike weather that day in San Diego. Officially, Berryhill is a convert to the cosmic enigmas of the Southwest. She’s fascinated with its lore, its odd cross-section of humanity, and its natural beauty. But one sensed that the high-desert town merely is the final stop on a four-year sojourn that eventually will bring her back home.

“I can’t wait to get back to the coast,” she said. “Because New Mexico is landlocked, I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of the country. It makes me crazy to be this far from the ocean.”

Two weeks after arriving in Taos, Berryhill already was making her presence felt on the local arts scene by initiating what she calls an “open-mouth night” at a local joint called Cafe Tazza. The name of the weekly potpourri event is a take-off on the “open-mike” amateur-invitational nights at folk and comedy clubs (Cafe Tazza has no microphone).

“Anyone can get up and perform whatever they want,” explained the series’ emcee. “We have white guys singing songs, Hispanics reading poetry, Indians doing traditional drumming. We had one guy from Mexico City who’s just this incredible percussionist.”

Berryhill’s own contribution to the high-desert hootenanny is an indicator of one of her current obsessions.

“I’m from Celtic ancestry,” she said, “so I do that sort of Celtic-folk stuff. About four years ago, I found out the Berryhills came over here from Ireland in the mid-1800s. Ever since, I’ve been reading a lot about Celtic history and doing research into my ancestry, which no one in my family ever talked about.”

Berryhill said one reason she feels comfortable in Taos is because the people there are so aware of their roots. Another reason is that she doesn’t stand out in Taos. “It seems like almost everyone here is either an artist or a bohemian type,” she said. “There are even some people here who bow to a monkey god.”

“In a good way, this is a really weird place,” she continued, laughing. “For one thing, there are more UFO sightings here than anywhere else on earth. I’m constantly looking for one; I think it’d be a great inspiration for a song. It’s a pretty free environment for creative thinking, that’s for sure.”

Living with her manager also has enabled Berryhill to participate in current negotiations with two major labels for the rights to release her third album. The singer wouldn’t divulge the identities of the record companies for fear of “screwing up” what she termed a “delicate process,” but she was more than happy to discuss the music she’s written for her next project.

“I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the last 2 1/2 years,” she said, “so I probably have enough songs for two albums. Sound-wise, it’s not a radical departure from my past stuff--it’s acoustic folk. But the lyrics are influenced by my recent research into poetic symbolism and archetypes.”

One of Berryhill’s new songs is called “Elvis of Marysville.”

“It’s about a woman who eats a fish she’d caught in an aqueduct in Northern California, and who then gives birth to a child she names Elvis, who then goes on this journey. It incorporates the Genesis Creation format--everything takes place over seven days--but it involves a lot of California mythology.”

That last point is important to Berryhill. A cousin, Dale Velzy, was a well-known figure in Southern California surfing circles in the ‘50s and hung out with the guys who were immortalized in the film, “Endless Summer.” Berryhill claims that her third album will reflect the coastal culture that is a major element of her “personal mythology.”

In accordance with that theme, she’s determined to record the album in Southern California, possibly in San Diego. She hopes to return home as early as mid-spring. At least in one respect it won’t be soon enough.

“I miss the real Mexican food you get in San Diego,” Berryhill said. “Southwest-style food is OK, but this green-chile stuff doesn’t make it. I’ve got this insatiable craving for refried beans and real salsa.”