Iris DeMent: Country Singer Via Suburbia

Before the CD booklets had even left the printer, Iris DeMent was reaping uncommon acclaim for her 1992 debut album, “Infamous Angel.” No less an authority than John Prine gave his blessing to the album, writing a note of endorsement that appeared on the booklet and cover.

“So listen to this music, this Iris DeMent. It’s good for you,” the respected singer-songwriter summed up.

The songs that captured Prine--as well as many critics after the album’s release--spoke of family and home, and of people with deep rural roots struggling against the sweep of change. They portrayed characters coping with death and displacement, but also finding strength and reassurance in the gospel music that had a profound influence on DeMent during a deeply religious upbringing in Buena Park.

DeMent’s style combines folk, country and bluegrass, and she sings with a sweet, old-time voice that sounds the way browned-in daguerreotype portraits from the 19th Century look. In her feeling-filled quaver, one hears an echo of Emmylou Harris, except that DeMent’s singing is even more rustic and tradition-laden.

After her debut on the independent Philo/Rounder label, DeMent, 32, says she is close to signing a major-label deal with Warner Bros. Speaking by phone this week from her home in Kansas City, DeMent, who sings tonight and Sunday at McCabe’s, said plans call for Warners to re-release “Infamous Angel” in May. Meanwhile, she has been writing new songs, trying to forget that people like Prine ever said such nice things about her.

“When you’ve done things and people have expressed approval of it, you can start working for approval,” she said. “I’m trying to (avoid) that as best I can. When I sit down to write, I try to block everything out--(pretend) that this never happened, I don’t have a record, nobody knows who I am, and it’s just me.”

Listen to DeMent tell her story, and you’ll find that she’s had lots of practice trying to be just herself, and that it didn’t come easily. She says she had to conquer a severe case of shyness and self-doubt before she could find the resolve to begin writing and singing her own songs at the age of 25.

She was born the youngest of 14 children on a farm in Arkansas, but spent most of her childhood and adolescence in Buena Park, the Orange County city best known as the home of Knott’s Berry Farm. DeMent’s father worked for years as a gardener and janitor at the nearby Movieland Wax Museum.

“My parents were very protective of us. We were discouraged from playing with kids outside the family,” DeMent said.

“My life revolved very much around the church. I have serious doubts I’d be doing music today if it hadn’t been for my upbringing in church, which was reinforced at home,” where the DeMent family often sang together.

“But I felt very conflicted, because a lot of things they were saying (in church) didn’t feel right to me, and I would have to sacrifice my own intelligence and my need to think for myself. But . . . I couldn’t walk away from it altogether.” Hence, the presence of two traditional gospel songs among the originals that make up her album. One of them, “Higher Ground,” features robust lead vocals by the singer’s 75-year-old mother, Flora Mae DeMent.

After high school, DeMent drifted, afraid to pursue her long-held hopes of getting into music. “I always wanted to, but never thought I could. I went through all these years thinking I wasn’t talented enough or didn’t have enough courage or wasn’t pretty enough.”

She wound up living in Topeka, Kan., where she enrolled in a college creative writing course. Soon, an artistic self began to emerge.

“I was doing really well in the class, and it seemed a lot of things changed for me really quick. The writing and the music, the two things I loved the most, started coming together. I said, ‘I’m just going to do what I do, singing the songs I love to sing, whatever way I want to sing them.’ I became a much happier person.”

After several years of singing at open-mike nights to overcome stage fright, DeMent moved to Nashville. Her two-year stay resulted in a record deal with Rounder after a label executive spotted her during a songwriters’ showcase at the Bluebird Cafe.

DeMent, who is married to a Kansas City firefighter, says that after they’ve heard her album, “people assume I lived on a farm” instead of spending most of her childhood in suburbia. “It’s not a tangible place I grew up in that I’m singing about, but the feelings that gave those songs life, I very much understand. Primarily because of my parents, the songs I write express a lot of that.”