The Rest Will Follow : Folkie Rosalie Sorrels, in O.C. Tonight, to Soon End Years of Constant Motion

Even a traveling lady has to slow down eventually.

Deceleration is almost at hand for Rosalie Sorrels, the highway-rambling folk singer whose many autobiographical songs and stories include a proud theme called “Traveling Lady.”

At age 63, Sorrels spent the first half of this year charging down the road as vigorously as ever, touring all over the country in her usual way. She says she logged 20,000 miles at the wheel in one four-month stretch crisscrossing the western United States.

Now, her left arm aching from arthritis and nerve damage worsened by too many hours driving herself from gig to gig, Sorrels has decided that after gutting out seven more shows in the next few weeks, she will end 30 years of almost constant motion and go into semiretirement at her cabin in rural Idaho.

She aims to resume performing after her arm gets better, but Sorrels, who plays tonight at Ball Junior High School in Anaheim, says her days of long-haul roving are over.

Her tradition-steeped folk music never attracted the mass audience achieved by some of her peers from the ‘60s folk boom. But Sorrels’ Orange County visits over the last four years have showcased a unique performer whose remarkable life makes for a special sort of confessional music.

Sorrels says her injured arm prompted her to enroll in Social Security recently and contemplate a performing cutback that will start with an unaccustomed six months’ break.

“I’m not a baby about pain, [but] a couple of times I was just down on my knees crying” from her arm trouble, she said this week over the phone from her house along a woodland creek near Boise. Her doctor “thinks I can get 90% of it back if I take the time off. I have a couple of projects I want to work on, and I’m more likely to get them done if I don’t go out beating the bushes.”

Before she rests and tries to heal, Sorrels plans to keep the performing commitments she already had made. It won’t be easy. “I can’t even hold a guitar up in the usual way,” she said. “I’ve found a way I can prop myself up so I can get through a concert.”

One of the engagements is a Nov. 22 show in Northern California with Bruce “Utah” Phillips, a fellow folkie road-warrior and friend of 40 years. Phillips has been coping with heart trouble that forced an end to his longtime regimen of touring.

“The concert is very near where he lives, so he doesn’t have to travel. I think it’s funny--two folk singers propping each other up on stage, doing a concert about the slings and arrows of outrageous aging,” Sorrels said, breaking into a rhythmic laugh. “I don’t know if either of us is capable of aging very gracefully. We don’t feel old, just inconvenienced.”

Sorrels recalls meeting Phillips at a bon voyage party in Utah before he shipped out to fight in the Korean War. The jovial-looking, white-bearded Phillips became known as a political radical, a humorous gadfly who also could write trenchant and moving songs.

Sorrels said that although they often have toured together over the years, they never have sung together: “I’d love to, but I can’t sing in the same key. We sit on the stage and have a conversation. We reminisce about things, like a stream of consciousness.”

The two finally have combined to release a joint album, “The Long Memory,” but it consists of solo performances rather than collaborative work.

The album features songs and stories rising out of the birth struggles of the American labor movement. Sorrels said she and Phillips recorded it four years ago at the request of an arts publication at Boise State University, whose editor wanted to document labor history for an audience in “one of the weakest union states in the country.”

The album was released nationally this year by Red House Records, a Minnesota-based folk label.

“I think there’s great interest” in the stories retold on “The Long Memory,” Sorrels said. “When I include that stuff in my concerts, I relate it to things that are going on now. It gives you some sense of the process of activating people to become involved. I can’t see that as just a dead issue. I opened for Leo Kottke for a university audience in Utah with a couple of those songs about Aunt Molly Jackson and got a standing ovation for it.”

The stories Sorrels can tell about herself--and has told on record and in concert--include harrowing experiences in her teens, when she went through a botched, illegal abortion, then, pregnant again, gave up her firstborn for adoption.

At 33, she struck out on her own after the collapse of her marriage and earned her living as a folk singer while raising five kids. The suicide of one son gave rise to such poignant songs as “Sing Like the Rain (Last Song for David)” and “Hitchhiker in the Rain,” which appears on her most recent release, the year-old “Borderline Heart.”

In 1989, Sorrels suffered a near-fatal cerebral aneurysm but recovered and resumed her grueling schedule. The “interesting times” of the famous Chinese curse continue to be her lot: Last week, a faulty wood-burning stove set the roof of her cabin on fire.

“I’m a walking disaster area,” Sorrels said, chuckling. She said she would not have been able to afford roof repairs, and would have had to abandon the house her father built, had it not been for the help of volunteer firefighters, who not only saved the house from burning down, but returned to patch the roof well enough to last the winter.

“I had just done a benefit for them. I brought in Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who they just adored.” That good turn was soon rewarded.

While she heals, Sorrels aims to finish a long-contemplated one-woman theatrical piece, based on the life and music of her friend Malvina Reynolds, the Bay Area singer and social activist who wrote “What Have They Done to the Rain?” and “Turn Around” (the one with the refrain, “Where are you going, my little one, little one”).

She also hopes to turn what she wryly calls her suite of “hostile” baby-rocking songs into an illustrated book, for parents who she feels need reassurance that it’s OK to harbor less-than-benevolent feelings toward colicky, difficult infants.

“I love what I do, and I don’t want to stop doing it altogether,” Sorrels said of her coming phase as the stay-at-home lady. “But I’m really looking forward to this six months.”

* Rosalie Sorrels plays tonight at the Ball Junior High School cafeteria, 1500 W. Ball Road, Anaheim. 8 p.m. $12; free for children under 18 if accompanied by an adult. (714) 638-1466.