FOLK MUSIC REVIEW : A Heart-to-Heart With Rosalie Sorrels in Anaheim

The strongest testimony to Rosalie Sorrels’ power to touch people came during intermission of her concert Saturday night at Ball Junior High School.

On the patio outside the auditorium, you could overhear a softly weeping middle-age man softly telling his companions about the pain of his “fractured relationship” with his daughter, feelings sparked by Sorrels’ songs and readings about families struggling to find a mutual understanding.

Singing and telling stories for an audience that ranged from snowy heads to babes-in-arms, this veteran folk singer from Idaho struck the most fundamental emotional chords.

It’s unlikely that any contemporary performer reveals more of his or her own life in a performance than does Sorrels. It has been an amazing and strikingly well-considered life, and she has a singular way of singing it and telling it in yarns both pointed and delightfully digressive. Sorrels’ reflections were honest, funny, saddening and beautiful, and it’s easy to see how they could lodge in the heart of a listener like that deeply moved man on the patio.

On the eve of Mother’s Day, Sorrels devoted much of her 2 1/2-hour solo performance to the subject of motherhood. Not motherhood in the abstract, or motherhood idealized, but motherhood observed and experienced firsthand as a woman who has tried to understand, connect with or endure the sometimes-thorny women in her life.

She did it with a folksy but artfully honed narrative style. Speaking in a soft but melodious voice that automatically drew you in, Sorrels would pause to punctuate the funny (often funny-despite-the-pain) parts with a gravelly laugh. When she got around to singing--and few could mind that it often took a while for her yarns to turn into songs--Sorrels came across in a voice worn with 59 years, not many of them easy, and further burnished by the traditional cast of much of her material. For all that, Sorrels’ singing remains sturdy and nearly pure.

Listening to her may be the closest you can come in a concert setting to the experience of reading a good novel, with the singer functioning as a strong, generous narrative voice (in fact, the show included readings from “The Little Prince,” Colette and “Report From Grimes Creek,” a pamphlet Sorrels has compiled and published from the marvelous writings of her mother, Nancy Stringfellow.)

Those looking for laughter could enjoy the song “Waltzing With Bears,” a nonsense song about a man so eccentric that his favorite pastime is doing just that. Sorrels dedicated it to her late father, Walter--after leading up to it with a story about him that rates as one of the all-time great drunken-bender narratives, in which family and police thought for three days he had drowned when in fact he had just hitchhiked to Oregon. That made waltzing with bears seem almost tame. (As a result of the episode, Sorrels said, her father gave up drinking for the last four years of his life, replacing his customary swigs from the bottle with cups of coffee: “He would regard (the coffee) with a baleful eye and say, ‘Here’s another cup of miserable substitute.’ ”)

Those wanting a good love song could relish “A Rose and an Apple Tree,” a romantic song written by Sorrels’ friend, the late Malvina Reynolds, or “Apple of My Eye,” a song Sorrels wrote and sang for one of her daughters at a time when they were so at-odds that talking wouldn’t suffice.

At the end of her first set, Sorrels wove together a strong sequence about motherhood that told of how she came to understand, if not warm to, a cold maternal grandmother, and the warmth she gained from her own mother’s understanding and endorsement of her hard-traveling life. She capped the sequence with “Mama,” singing with full force its stirring declaration of selfhood and pride at having been able to sustain the life she chose.

Sorrels didn’t spare herself the saddest parts. “Standing in the Rain” meditated on a deep, double loss. It linked her son’s suicide in 1976 with the end of the ‘60s communitarian spirit that sustained her as she went from being a Utah housewife in a bad marriage to a traveling performer scrambling to raise five kids on a traditional-folkie’s meager wages (Nanci Griffith mythologizes and celebrates Sorrels in her song, “Ford Econoline.” Maybe Griffith, who is huge in Ireland, should take Sorrels there as a touring partner: After singing a lovely Irish song, Sorrels confessed she has never been to her ancestral homeland because “I haven’t had the money.”)

That ‘60s spirit of fellowship and connection among strangers is gone, Sorrels said: “I still can’t understand why we can’t get rid of what it is that has made us afraid all the time.”

But rather than retreat into nostalgia, she ended with a newly written song hoping that the end of her life, “The Last Go-Round,” may hold out wonders--even if wonder can only be achieved in death, and a spiritual rejoining with friends and loved ones.

With her vivid manner of performance, Sorrels keeps a good chunk of her past alive and full of meaning--not only for herself, but for her listeners.

Sorrels’ performance was part of the Living Tradition monthly folk concert series, which continues June 12 at Ball Junior High School with a show by Sorrels’ good friend, Utah Phillips--who may not have as mellifluous a voice, but is an engaging fellow to spend an evening with.