Don’t Look Now, but Mary-Chapin Carpenter Is Playing Fast and Loose With Country’s Grand Traditions : YANKEE PANKEE

For better or worse, the derustication of American life is virtually complete.

And, since rural America barely exists anymore, it’s no surprise that country music is no longer exclusively the domain of people with rural roots.

You know that’s true when natives of small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Kentucky vie for the title of best female vocalist in the Country Music Assn.’s annual awards derby--as Tanya Tucker, Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood and Wynonna Judd did last week--only to lose out to somebody who grew up in Princeton, N.J., and Tokyo, got her college education in Providence, R.I., and has forged a musical career from a home base in Washington, D.C.

Mary-Chapin Carpenter, a damn Yankee, is the CMA’s female country vocalist of the year.

Wonder what Charlie Daniels and Hank Jr., those ever-so-lovable neo-Confederate wavers of that emblem of exalted moral values, the stars and bars, make of that? The South isn’t gonna do it again, fellas. Regionalism is dying, killed by the same mass-communications, mass-mobility culture that made you rich.

In such a culture, “country music” is becoming a stylistically diffuse marketing term for just about anything that executives in Nashville figure they can sell, Mary-Chapin Carpenter being one of them.

Carpenter has about the same relationship to the rural tradition of country music as Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, whose countrified twanger, “The Bug,” she covers on her current album, “Come On Come On.” That is, she might have a fond regard for traditional country music and occasionally tap into it, but she’s not a part of it.

What Carpenter is is a good folk-pop singer-songwriter who can be successfully sold by the country marketing machinery because there no longer is any such thing as a “country” sector of American culture to be marketed to.

Virtually anything in a melodic pop form can be country nowadays, and, with boundaries lowered, all sorts of people are buying music that’s nominally “country.” Just as the old South is being swiftly assimilated into a homogenous modern America, old-line country is being assimilated into--and is in turn absorbing increasing chunks of--the musical regions of rock and pop.

That’s probably a good thing, as long as you’re not too concerned with labels. Music doesn’t belong in separate, sealed compartments labeled “album rock,” “country,” “college-alternative” and such, anyway. Artists and songs need to be taken one at a time, without undue reference to category.

If you turn on a radio station that plays “contemporary country,” you still can have some expectation of hearing fiddles, steel guitars and voices that twang, yodel and crack strategically, although the production will be polished to replicate those urban pop phenomena of the ‘70s, country-rock (the Eagles) and singer-songwriter soft-rock (James Taylor and Carole King). Both of those were the music-of-nurture for vast numbers of Baby Boomers. Consequently, the country marketing machine can exploit not only a social longing for our lost rural past, but a personal longing on the part of a huge generational cohort for its swiftly receding youth.

In all the categories, the most important thing from a musical perspective is that the performers with enduring qualities such as emotional honesty and a distinctive, personal vision can still be heard.

Carpenter’s success (besides winning the CMA award, “Come On Come On” and her previous album, “Shooting Straight in the Dark,” have sold more than half a million copies) suggests that some good ones still can get across.

On her new album, Carpenter’s only obvious stylistic nods to twang-based country come on the rocking “I Feel Lucky,” which actually has more to do with the Georgia Satellites’ Chuck Berry appropriations than with Nashville tradition, and on the aforementioned Dire Straits number.

Elsewhere, Carpenter plays straight-on folk-pop as she taps into the anxieties fostered by change as society moves away from those good old days when, many of us like to think, values and familial arrangements were so much simpler, so much better. “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” puts a sardonic wrecking ball to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home as a thankless drone.

“I Am A Town” waxes vaguely wistful about the passing of small-town Americana. Its failure to take a strong point of view may be an artistic lapse on Carpenter’s part, but that very failure reflects the ambivalence most of us with roots in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s have: How can we honestly lament the passing of a way of life that we abandoned voluntarily, even eagerly?

It’s on the album-closing title song, “Come On Come On,” that Carpenter comes to grips with the question of change by taking the intimate, close-in focus that usually works best for her. It’s a moving, simple but widely resonating song about how much it hurts for time to pass, for things to change and for us to be helpless to do anything about it. Carpenter can only respond with a chorus of whispered, caressing consolation. You can call that folk, pop, soft-rock or even country. But you have to call it honest, and valuable.

Who: Mary-Chapin Carpenter.

When: Friday, Oct. 9, at 8 and 10:30 p.m. With Iris DeMent.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $22.50. The early show is sold out.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.