POP/FOLK : WORD-CLASS CITIZEN : Veteran Folk Artist Rosalie Sorrels Taps Universal Feelings in Her Songs and Stories

If Dan Quayle thinks he is presidential timber, maybe he should stop tilting at fictitious windmills like Murphy Brown and take on somebody who actually is somebody, and a pretty formidable somebody at that.

In a culture-wars tussle with Rosalie Sorrels, he surely would have all he could handle--that is, if he didn’t find himself so charmed and engaged by the sheer warmth and crusty strength of character of this veteran of the grass-roots traditional folk circuit that he conceded the podium to her.

Sorrels, a great-grandmother at 61, will have the podium to herself when she performs one of her distinctive song-and-narrative concerts Saturday at Ball Junior High School in Anaheim.

The Idaho woman’s remarkable life story and her achievements as a singer and storytelling font of wisdom have led some highly placed people in the folk world to describe her in the most glowing terms.

Nanci Griffith called her a “living legend” in “Ford Econoline,” a song chronicling Sorrels’ decision in 1966 to get out of an untenable marriage, taking her five children with her as she forged a new life as a self-supporting, folk-singing single mom. Last month, Pete Seeger described Sorrels as a “national treasure” in a letter nominating her for a $10,000 folk heritage fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Her love, her humor, her wisdom set a good example for all of us,” Seeger wrote.

Those qualities were evident in Sorrels’ two previous Orange County concerts, in 1992 and 1993. They are deeply embedded in her performances, having been tested by hard experience. Sorrels’ life never was the fairy tale implied in Griffith’s breezy song. One of her sons committed suicide (Sorrels memorialized him in a moving song, “Sing Like the Rain (Last Song for David)”; the other did some jail time for burglary. She has been tested, not cloistered, and it gives her art all the more authority and poignancy.

Sorrels’ core concern on recent albums has been family values--but she doesn’t treat it as the rhetorical abstraction of the politician. She turns the concept into the knotty, ambiguous living thing that family is, drawing on memories of her grandparents and parents and working in the memorable writings of her mother, Nancy Stringfellow, a Boise, Ida., bookstore owner who died this year at 84. Children--how they should be taught and the kind of world that adults are making for them--figure greatly in such recent Sorrels albums as “Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House” (1991) and this year’s “What Does It Mean to Love?”

Sorrels, who records for the small, traditional folk label Green Linnet, was scheduled to record a new album this week in San Francisco before coming to Southern California for a series of weekend shows. The album, said her manager (and daughter), Jacqueline Murray, will be a collection of songs, rather than the mixture of music and narrative heard on her recent albums. Sorrels also is still at work on a long-term project, a one-woman play she hopes to produce and perform, based on the life and music of Malvina Reynolds, the activist and folk singer known for “Turn Around” (the song that starts, “Where are you going my little one, little one?”) and “What Have They Done to the Rain?”

When the time comes for somebody to do a film or play on Sorrels, there will be no lack of fascinating material. In the meantime, there’s the chance to get a taste of this rare performer who can turn a concert into something approaching a heart-to-heart talk.

* Who: Rosalie Sorrels.

* When: Saturday, Dec. 10, at 8 p.m.

* Where: Ball Junior High School, 1500 W. Ball Road, Anaheim.

* Whereabouts: Take the Santa Ana (5) Freeway to the Harbor Boulevard exit; go north to the first traffic light, Ball Road, and turn left. Ball Junior High School is on the left (south) side of Ball Road, just past Hampstead Street and some railroad tracks.

* Wherewithal: $10; free for children 12 and under accompanied by an adult.

* Where to call: (714) 638-1466.

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