Nanci Griffith and The Great American Music Show : She Tried Country Pop and It Didn’t Fit. Then She Dug Into the Musical Roots of America and Found Her True Voice in Folk Music. Now She’s on a Mission for Woody Guthrie and a Few Other Folks.

Nanci Griffith has been unplugged for years. Which is to say that Nanci Griffith is what was once known in America as a folk singer. For more than two decades the term has languished as a symbol of an earnest, bygone era long ago supplanted by the power chords and swagger of rock and all that has come after.

Although the tradition never really went away, many of its practitioners vanished into a kind of artistic lost generation, struggling to support themselves on independent record labels and in tiny clubs and church coffeehouses. Some fell by the wayside, but Griffith, a Texan whose frisky contralto and earthy art songs are, as they might say in Hollywood, character-driven, has not only survived but achieved the kind of acceptance generally thought to be beyond the realm of folkdom. Her latest album, “Flyer,” made with the help of members of U2, R.E.M., Mark Knopfler and the Chieftains, has sold about 300,000 copies. On tour, she has been filling 1,500-seat halls across the country and in Europe. Last fall, she played four nights on Broadway and sold out three nights at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Griffith, it seems, has become something of a standard-bearer for a folk revival. No one agrees what folk music is anymore--if they ever did--but as rap, metal, grunge, post-punk rock and line-dance country continue to hammer the radio and record charts, it’s tempting to view the success of performers like Griffith and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin and even R.E.M. as a reflection of a renewed appreciation for the simplicity of acoustic instruments and lyrical storytelling that are the roots of blues and country music.

The MTV Unplugged shows, designed to scale down some of rock’s biggest acts for living room-size semi-acoustic sessions, has been one sign of the back-to-basics movement that dates back to the late-’80s emergence of Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman. A more recent marker is the the surprising sales of the Chieftains’ new album, “Long Black Veil,” that ushered singers like Sting, Mick Jagger, Sinead O’Connor and Tom Jones into the traditional acoustic world with Ireland’s fabled folk ensemble. (On April 1, that album reached reached No. 22 on Billboard’s Top 200 chart.) Along with Griffith’s “Flyer” and former Blaster Dave Alvin’s mostly acoustic “King of California,” the Chieftains’ album has actually been getting airplay--something rare for folk performers. It’s being played on stations flying the new banner of Adult Album Alternative, a format designed to combat the tiresome “just the hits” regimen and acknowledge some of the vibrant but radio-invisible folk and “roots” music being made.

“They’re starting to find a place for all these acts that don’t fit in anywhere,” says Alvin. “Nanci Griffith may not sell as many records as Gloria Estefan, but she’s doing OK.”

“I’d say the folk scene is way more organized than it was even in the ‘60s,” says Brad Paul, national promotions director for the leading independent folk record label, Philo/Rounder in Cambridge, Mass., that still distributes Griffith’s first four LPs. “The end of the ‘70s was the low mark. There were maybe two clubs left in Boston in 1979 and two radio shows. Now, there are too many clubs and coffeehouses to even list, and you can hear the music seven days a week on the radio.”

Rejected for years by commercial radio and the mass media, artists like Griffith, Christine Lavin, Robin and Linda Williams, David Wilcox, Lucinda Williams, Bill Morrissey, Cheryl Wheeler, Tom Russell and Townes Van Zandt continued making music at clubs like McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, at festivals and at house concerts, and in some cases found receptive audiences in Europe. Public radio and college radio have been a lifeline to their recordings.

“We’re way up in attendance in the last two years,” says John Chelew, who books the 150-seat space at McCabe’s. “We’re seeing a new generation of college kids and high school students/ Little girls with nose rings and purple hair are coming to see Doc Watson.”

It says something about the fate of folk music in America that Griffith, who started out in Austin in the late ‘70s, got her first serious radio airplay in England and Ireland, where station playlists are less rigid. Her version of Julie Gold’s “From a Distance” became a No. 1 song in Ireland in 1985, six years before Bette Midler had a hit with it in the United States during the Gulf War.

Griffith’s eventual ascendancy back home followed a period of searching for something radio-friendly by flirting with country and pop music on the four MCA studio albums that she made between 1986 and 1991. She finally decided to risk her career on a quixotic detour that made no practical sense. Using her own money, she recorded an anthology, not of her songs, but of the folk singers and songwriters who had most influenced her when she was coming of age. Titled “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” after Truman Capote’s first novel, the album included songs by Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Kate Wolf, Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt.

Released by Elektra, “Other Voices” surprised almost everyone, outsold Griffith’s MCA records and carried her to Carnegie Hall and around the world, “bringing this music back to the open ear,” as she put it. It won her the Grammy Award for contemporary folk album of 1993 and suggested that folk might again be a term of endearment.

“It did take a long time for it to come back, but these things always seem to go in cycles,” says Jim Rooney, former manager of the historic Club 47 at Harvard Square, Cambrige, and the producer of “Other Voices” and Griffith’s breakthrough albums on Rounder, “Once in a Very Blue Moon” and “Last of the True Believers” in the mid-’80s. “I think one of the enduring elements of the folk scene is its personality, its intimacy. The fact that you can sit in a room with a singer or a small group and hear their music very closely. And I think that as rock has gone to its logical extremes of arenas and big sound and is also running out of ideas, people have come back to folk music in a natural way, looking for personality.”

“Somebody up high above said folk music doesn’t sell,” Griffith says, “even though we all know that’s not true. But that passed around (record company) offices until everyone believed it. My whole reason for making ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’ was to take the F out of folk music, for it to cease to be called the F-word in the music industry. And if it is the F-word, then Nanci Griffith is the F-word. That was really important to me when I made that album--to get that clear once and for all.”

This is the way Nanci Griffith talks. She’s on a mission from the ‘60s. Her concerts are not just musical events but campaign stops for a national folk revival. On a Sunday night in San Diego, she’s onstage at the Spreckels Theater, a one-time opera house that is full except for the last rows of the upper balcony. The audience ranges from 40-somethings to college students. A lot of them are women. There are guys with pony tails, suspenders, frizzy beards, gray sideburns and bald spots; women in flannel shirts, loose sweaters and denim jackets. If there is a fashion statement here, it is being whispered.

Griffith, a willowy figure in jeans and a thigh-length black coat, has walked into a pool of spotlight at center stage and opened with “The Flyer,” the title song from the new album. It’s another of her compositions about love and motion, this one about an imagined romance with an Air Force pilot (“He said he’d never married/Cuz, his heart was in the clouds/And I said I was too clumsy/That I broke the wings of the loves I found . . . .”) Then comes “From a Distance,” the ecumenical hymn that she has recorded in five languages.

Standing at the mike, she plays an amplified acoustic guitar, while positioned around her is a six-piece band she has dubbed the Blue Moon Orchestra: two guitars, bass, drums, percussion and keyboards. The keyboardist and leader is her sometime writing partner James Hooker, late of the ‘70s progressive-country outfit The Amazing Rhythm Aces and before that a sideman for soulman Al Green.

The sound varies from the most tender accompaniment on the quieter ballads like “Gulf Coast Highway” and “Always Will” (bassist Ron de la Vega brings out a cello) to a complement of sonic drums and medium-grade firepower propelling numbers such as “Outbound Plane” “Listen to the Radio,” “This Heart” and the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today.” The forgotten term folk rock comes to mind when all cylinders kick in, but it rarely overpowers Griffith’s deceptively fragile voice, which is inscribing two hours’ worth of exquisite longing and tart observation.

Between numbers, she romances the audience with rambling, Texas-accented asides about her life and influences. Her accent gets bigger when she slips into song, curling the word town into “TEOWN” and years into “YAIRS.” The near-eccentricity of some of her pronunciations and phrasings is part of her charm, but it’s a charm not aimed at heavy-rotation radio consultants, who are apt to consider it “weird” and “folky.”

But folky is exactly what the San Diego audience wants tonight. When she introduces “Across the Great Divide,” the wistful song about aging that is Track 1 on “Other Voices,” her mention of the album produces a roar of recognition in the hall. The late Kate Wolf, she tells the crowd, almost preaching now, “lived and performed during the 20-year period when folk music was the F-word and belongs to a lost folk generation.” Griffith goes on to tell us that Wolf is looking down from heaven tonight, perhaps able to enjoy hearing her song be found again.

Eventually, she finishes with the rollicking, Buddy Hollyesque “This Heart,” then comes back for a first encore with her sober reflection on Ireland’s troubles, “It’s a Hard Life.” She saves for the last song of the night her grown-up lullaby and affirmation of solitude, “Goodnight to a Mother’s Dream,” dedicated to her beloved 70-year-old former beatnik mom, who taught her yoga at the age of 5. The melody rolling off her guitar is soothing, while the lyrics sting: “Maybe mother just didn’t see/That love would be the only thing/Her daughter would ever need . . . .” Not a line that conjureds up the image of a protest singer, although some folklorists concede that songs of unrequited love are themselves a form of protest.

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While folk may be a badge of honor for Griffith, the term remains hard to define in the heavily cross-pollinated music world of the ‘90s. Consider: Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger have now covered Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” bluegrass chanteuse Alison Krauss is reinterpreting Karla Bonoff and Foreigner, and rocker Adam Duritz of Counting Crows is harmonizing with Griffith on the “Flyer” album’s “Going Back to Georgia.”

Griffith has had the term folk used against her by enemies and friends alike. The suburban-eared country radio establishment has used it to suggest that her voice is too literary or cloying, while the “folk Nazis,” or militant purists, regard her and Mary Chapin Carpenter as too modern, successful and self-absorbed to qualify as real folk artists.

“They never warmed up to her music on country radio,” says Tony Brown, the influential MCA-Nashville executive who produced Griffith’s two LPs for the label’s country division, “Lone Star State of Mind” and “Little Love Affairs.” “They thought it was too folky, and it was folky, but I thought that kind of folk music should fit in with the mix for the mere fact that Kathy Mattea was taking some of Nanci’s songs and having hits with them. I thought, why can’t Nanci have her own hits?”

But at Sing Out! magazine, the 45-year-old bible of folk music started by Pete Seeger, executive director and editor Mark Moss is uncomfortable hearing Griffith and Carpenter described as folk singers at all. “At Sing Out! we believe folk music is about people using music as part of their everyday lives,” Moss says, explaining that it should be music not made for profit that addresses community issues and concerns. Furthermore, he scoffs at the notion that there is anything like a folk resurgence going on, since “real folk music is not subject to the whims of popdom.”

Folk scaled the barricades of popular music in the ‘50s and ‘60s through its rediscovery and celebration of indigenous songs composed not by Tin Pan Alley craftsmen but by ordinary, untrained “folk”--aging blues men and cowboys, labor organizers and Appalachian balladeers. Steeped in egalitarianism, folk fed protest anthems to the civil-rights and anti-war movements. At the same time, marquee talent such as Dylan, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell turned the old forms inside out, reaching for a new literacy and complexity in popular song that had little to do with politics. Yet its influence was overrun even as it was absorbed by the coming age of electric guitars and synthesizers, speaker columns and stadium concerts. At some point, the term folk itself became a liability, signifying unhipness in the terminally hip radio/record marketplace.

Compared to the ‘60s almost everybody is wired to some extent now, but at least the new wave of folk artists leans toward the acoustic principle and generally tends to go easy on the fuzz tones. A recent ad for the scruffy folk magazine Dirty Linen goes right to the problem of definition when it asks, “WHAT IS FOLK MUSIC? WHO CARES?!?!”

“All non-classical music is folk music in one sense,” says Larry Groce, singer and host of “Mountain Stage,” a weekly live-music program from Charleston, W. Va., that’s heard on 128 public radio stations (though not in Los Angeles). “It’s music that stays in the idiom.” Though “Mountain Stage” would be considered a folk venue by some, its long list of performers has included--besides Nanci Griffith--R.E.M., Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cassandra Wilson and Lyle Lovett. Groce prefers to describe the show’s underlying premise as “music that has something to say--music with substance that’s not commercially driven.”

You could say that folk, in part, carries on the centuries-old tradition of the troubadour, with song lyrics meant to be understood, lyrics not to be confused with those of the high-powered hokum variety heard on the 2,700-strong urban “country” radio stations that rule the nation’s airwaves. They are the stations that don’t play Griffith or, for that matter, Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash or George Jones.

“They don’t play Loretta Lynn on country radio either,” Griffith points out. “As far as I’m concerned, Loretta Lynn is one of the greatest folk songwriters ever. She happened to be on country radio (once), but what she did was folk, because she captured the times that she lived in with ‘Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ ’ and ‘The Pill’ and ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter.’ She captured the time and set free an entire country of rural women. She set them free--literally. She said, ‘You can do this.’ ”

*

The Neighborhood Church in Pasadena seats about 300 and is, on a Saturday night in January, packed with what looks like the Pasadena chapter of the Nanci Griffith audience in San Diego. But this is a three-act concert by Dave Alvin, Tom Russell and Peter Case, all defrocked band members now doing their (mostly) solo acoustic thing. Before last year, no one would have called Dave Alvin a folk singer. He grew up in Downey and used to play with his brother Phil in the Blasters and the group X. Tom Russell, also a Los Angeles native, has fronted the Tom Russell Band, but he is mainly a singer-songwriter who has built a following in Europe and the Midwest. Peter Case used to be in the Plimsouls, remembered for their ‘80s college radio and L.A.-area KROQ favorite, “Million Miles Away.”

Alvin, now 39, is onstage with an acoustic guitar, laying down a rhythmic, string-twisting intro to “Wanda and Duane,” his sardonic portrait of concrete desert romance, set somewhere near the 605 Freeway. “I know this is supposed to be an acoustic, folk music show, but if Chuck Berry isn’t folk music, I don’t know what is,” he proclaims, acknowledging the roots of the riff he’s working. Alvin is backed by another guitar player and a partial drum set, but many of his songs, like the Civil War lament “Andersonville,” could pass for classically structured folk ballads, telling stories of time and place. “King of California,” the title tune of his 1994 independent “bestseller” album for the Oakland label Hightone, is a Gold Rush tragedy about a prospector killed in pursuit of a woman he can’t afford. When Alvin plays it, he gets a distinctive, antique sound from his guitar by hitting the strings in the “claw hammer” style invented for the banjo.

“One of the great things about playing acoustic is it tends to cut through all the bull- - - - that surrounds playing music these days,” Alvin says later, “the marketing, the demographics, the images, the poses, the fact that I can take a really horrible song into the studio and make it sound great. I think that playing acoustic is right now a nice, intelligent reaction to all that. Sometimes when everybody’s yelling, maybe it’s better to whisper.”

Russell, who’s been based in New York since 1981 and co-wrote the Suzy Bogguss hit “Outbound Plane” with Nanci Griffith, explains why he spent so much time in Europe and made three albums in Norway. “We couldn’t really survive in the United States,” Russell, who’s in his mid-40s, says of his trade. “Like, Nanci has a big following in Europe. We find where the audiences are that will listen, and we go there. Because the money is usually better over there, too. The radio is hipper.

“I take the United States kind of like guerrilla warfare, one town at a time. The Midwest is pretty good for me. St. Louis is a good city for me. Why can I fill a 500-seater in St. Louis? It’s a combination: The public radio station in that town plays my stuff a lot, there’s a local independent record store where word of mouth says, ‘Have you heard “Poor Man’s Dream?” ’ and a couple of local journalists like the stuff. Audiences in the Midwest are unjaded. They’re like Europeans in a way. If they think your writing is good, they’ll applaud it and support it. They’re not as affected by the hype of the major media in the big cities.”

Tonight Russell reminds the audience at the church why his sub-basement-level voice makes people think of Johnny Cash, and why his songs recall the social realism of Merle Haggard. His vividly drawn tunes include stories about prizefighter Jack Johnson, Vietnam casualties, Edith Piaf, self-destructive New Jersey teen-agers, a cockfighting champion and a prisoner’s hopeful tattoo in the shape of a blue wing. He and Alvin have co-produced a songwriter’s tribute album to Haggard for Hightone, “Tulare Dust,” with contributing performances from Joe Ely, Iris Dement, Rosie Flores, Marshall Crenshaw and Steve Young, among others.

Says Alvin: “It’s presented in a folk way. Because when you take away all the stuff about Merle, he’s a folk singer. He’s as much a folk singer as Bob Dylan is, and I don’t think you’d get an argument from Bob Dylan on that.”

Over the winter, “Tulare Dust” topped the new roots-respecting Americana radio chart, a format currently in place at some 54 commercial stations trying to pick up where mainstream country radio leaves off.

For Alvin and Russell, the Americana and AAA (Adult Album Alternative) charts are a small but hopeful sign of a change in the musical weather. “I just think people are starved again for that directness and character,” Russell says. “It’s almost like wanting to hear some dialogue again, to see some black-and-white movies again.”

*

“Things are changing a little bit,” says Nanci Griffith, sitting in an office at Elektra Records in Beverly Hills recently and looking ahead to an appearance on “The Tonight Show” that evening. “Someone can be considered a folk artist, and it’s finally OK for Spin magazine to write a review of their records. I definitely think there is more receptiveness to it. But in the meantime, you have a whole generation of artists such as myself who got lost that maybe can’t be found again, that spent 15 years doing what they did and were ignored, and who politely went away. Because they simply couldn’t continue without some sort of industry support. I feel very fortunate that I was on a major label, and I was determined to do what I do and stick with it. But I feel like we lost a whole slew of great American artists.”

Griffith, who turns 42 this year, logged some lean miles along the way, flinging herself out onto the fragile network of folk clubs and “listening rooms” that survived the vagaries of musical fashion, a life she has documented in songs like “Workin’ in Corners” and “Spin on a Red Brick Floor.”

“I remember once I had gone to the Northeast to play a bunch of club dates,” she says, “and I was driving myself around America, and I was coming back and I hit, like, Texarkana, and I think I had $5 in my pocket. And I was just hoping that I had enough gasoline in my car to get to Austin and to get home.”

Even after she moved to Nashville in 1985 to be closer to the country recording industry, she remembers she was so poor that she didn’t have a car or the money to buy a fan for her non-air-conditioned apartment. “Then I made the ‘Last of the True Believers’ album, and things kind of changed and got better.”

Indeed, Griffith is no longer workin’ in corners. She’s seen her name posted at Carnegie Hall, taken part in a star-strewn tribute to Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden and been a guest on the late-night television shows of both Jay Leno and David Letterman--more than once. That is about as far as a born-again folk singer can travel in the inhospitable world of show business.

Woody Guthrie, the totem of the folk revival of 30 years ago and an inspiration to Pete Seeger, Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Griffith, was little known in his prime and lived most of his life in rented rooms and tiny apartments. The popularity of his hobo songs--”This Land Is Your Land,” “Pastures of Plenty” and “Bound for Glory”--came after younger performers and audiences discovered the trove of material he’d been stocking for decades.

Individual singers and groups kept Guthrie’s songs alive, maybe not on the Hit Parade but passed down and around through the back channels of America, where their hard truths and simple joys eventually poked into the public domain. Guthrie had only a weather-beaten guitar strapped over his shoulder; Nanci Griffith has the Blue Moon Orchestra. But when you get down to it, she’s running that same highway that set him in motion in the 1930s, describing on a fret board and six strings the journeys of a restless heart and the times in which she is living. Call it a return to tradition or a tremor in the whims of popdom, but it looks as though a few people out there are still listening for the words.