Laurie Lewis: On the Road Again : Pop music: A year after suffering injuries in a van accident while touring, the bluegrass star is continuing her highly regarded career with a Long Beach concert and a new album of duets.

There is a big difference between being an attraction and being in traction, and bluegrass bandleader Laurie Lewis learned it the hard way.

Lewis and two members of her band, Grant Street, were on the road in Arizona in March, 1994, heading home to the Bay Area after the last gig of a winter tour, when Lewis fell asleep at the wheel and their van crashed.

Lewis, a multiple threat as singer, songwriter and fiddle player, sustained multiple traumas, including a fractured skull and injuries to her back, neck and hand. Mandolin player Tom Rozum, her partner for vocal duets, was left in even worse shape with assorted fractures. Consequently, “The Oak and the Laurel,” a new album of Lewis-Rozum duets, marks a comeback from severe adversity as well as a continuation of Lewis’ highly regarded career.

Speaking over the phone from her home in Berkeley last week, Lewis, 44, said the fact that she and Rozum were the two band members badly hurt in the accident had nothing to do with their decision to return with a duo album. (Grant Street’s bassist, Jerry Logan, was not seriously injured, and guitarist Peter McLaughlin, who lives in Arizona, was not riding with the others when the wreck occurred.)

“It was the project that had been on the list of things to do the longest, and therefore the one we wanted to do first,” said Lewis, who will lead Grant Street tonight at the Long Beach Museum of Art. “Tom and I have been singing duets together for about nine years, and we decided it was high time to put some of them down” on record.

The album shows Lewis’ range of interests. Her style is formed as much by the broader, folk-based singer-songwriter movement as by the instrumental fireworks and signature vocal blends of traditional bluegrass music.

Drawing selections from the Carter Family, the Louvin Brothers and the Everly Brothers, Lewis and Rozum pay tribute on their new album to some of their harmony-singing forebears, but the oldies are balanced by songs from contemporary writers, including two Lewis originals that depict love in forms both fleeting and enduring.

The duets album follows “True Stories,” the 1993 solo album that Lewis was promoting at the time of her van wreck. The album, which showcases Lewis’ talent for detail as a lyricist, won her 1994 female vocalist of the year honors from the International Bluegrass Music Assn. (an award she also had won in 1992), as well as a song of the year award for her recording of “Who Will Watch the Home Place?” a poignant ballad written by Kate Long.

Lewis couldn’t play the fiddle for more than two months after the accident but returned to the stage before that to sing and strum a guitar. Rozum’s recuperation cost him about three months of touring time. Lewis said that her recovery has been complete, while Rozum still copes with pain and stiffness and receives physical therapy for his injuries.

A close brush with total disaster on the road is no small thing for a band on the folk music circuit, where the limited financial returns dictate long, do-it-yourself van drives instead of the chauffeured tour buses and chartered jets that major pop stars enjoy.

“I could hardly wait to get out and play again” after the accident, Lewis said. “But the way we travel means a lot of time, unfortunately, spent driving. When we first went on the road again, both Jerry and I had constant replays of the accident in our minds, sometimes to a very debilitating degree. ‘OK, got to pull over, got to take a walk.’ So you just learn to get past that stuff. There has not been a day that’s gone by since the accident that I haven’t thought about it, but the frequency is generally lessening.”

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Along with those difficult flashbacks, Lewis says, the crash has left her with a deepened appreciation for what she does.

“I look forward to any gig playing with my band. They’re really great guys and really fun to play with. I can’t tell you how grateful I feel to do what I love to do. There’s nothing that points it out so profoundly as coming so close to death. I truly believe that a half inch one way or another, and I would have broken my neck.”

Lewis, a Long Beach native, has lived in Berkeley since she was 8 years old. She studied classical violin as a girl, but folk guitar was her chief musical pleasure. After her college years (she quit shy of a degree to manage a dance studio), she was drawn to the Bay Area’s bluegrass scene. In the mid-1970s, Lewis joined the Good Ol’ Persons, which, in its earliest incarnation, consisted entirely of young female persons.

“It started by accident,” she recalled. “We got together as a kaffeeklatsch, a support group, because we all played music and knew each other from jams at Paul’s Saloon in San Francisco. We decided we would do a set of music at the jam, just for something to work on. We played Paul’s Saloon, and immediately the owner saw commercial potential [in an all-women bluegrass act] and all of a sudden we were a band.”

Lewis moved on to other bands, forming Grant Street in 1979 and launching her solo recording career in 1986. All along, she said, she has defined bluegrass tradition broadly, rather than trying to replicate the old-line approaches of such founding figures as Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision, or anything I had to grapple with,” Lewis said. “As I came to write my own material, it was clear I write in other styles, and not just in [the style of] traditional material. It’s far more important for me to express myself and create something meaningful to me than to ask, ‘Am I playing this the way Chubby Wise [fiddle player of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys] would have played it?’ ”

Much has been made of punk rock’s out-of-nowhere arrival during the past year as a major commercial force. Now something parallel--or at least the seed of something parallel--has sprouted in the bluegrass world, with the success this year of Alison Krauss, the fetching young folk-bluegrass singer and fiddler who is Lewis’ label-mate on the independent roots-music company, Rounder Records.

Krauss, who arrived as a teen-age prodigy on the folk and bluegrass scene 10 years ago, has sold more than a million copies of her latest album, “Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection.”

Lewis applauds Krauss’ success and feels that it could “open up people’s ears to acoustic instruments played in a vaguely similar style to the way I play.” At the same time, she neither foresees, nor hopes for, an explosion of her own into the big-venue, mainstream country world where success has taken Krauss.

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“I don’t think that’s really where I’m headed, or what I want,” Lewis said. “I love being able to do what I do and have an audience for it, and I would love for the audience to be a bit bigger. But I don’t want to go around playing opening act for Garth Brooks or playing double bills in arenas with big electric country bands. I suspect I wouldn’t be happy if I were in that situation.”

* Laurie Lewis and Grant Street play tonight at the Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. 7 p.m. $11, with discounts for seniors and museum members. (310) 439-2119.