Spunk Rock

Folk purism met its Waterloo on the day in 1965 when Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Now even Nanci Griffith gets to benefit from the fruits of that victory of expansive vision over narrow dictates.

Texas-reared singer-songwriter Griffith has had an honorable, sometimes eloquent career dating to her 1978 debut album. But Griffith’s work has been mainly on the demure side, and one thinks of her primarily as a singer of tastefully measured, well-observed, typically wistful slices of life delivered in a sweet, delicate voice.

She didn’t help allay that image a few years ago when she withdrew from a tour with the Chieftains, reportedly because the third act on the bill, Celtic fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, was showing too much punkish attitude. Perhaps there was more to it. Nevertheless, in bailing out, Griffith came off as prissy, the nice girl in class who runs to Teacher when the bad boys act up.

Ani DiFranco, the loud, exuberantly full-of-herself, self-styled “folk singer” who is shaping the alterna-rock generation’s idea of what folk music is--she headlines tonight at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center--might have cussed MacIsaac out from the stage if she had a problem with him, but she wouldn’t have packed up and run.

Still, Griffith’s embrace of electrified folk is apparent on her upcoming album, “Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful).” It’s a collaborative, all-covers sequel to “Other Voices/Other Rooms,” a 1993 acoustic tribute to her prime songwriting influences. She opens the new album with Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson classics and the folk-pop nugget “You Were on My Mind”--songs or songwriters who took their license from that Dylan-goes-electric breakthrough.

At the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana on Wednesday, Griffith broke through her restraint and showed that she can rock a little too. She was no DiFranco, of course, nor even a more conventional but rich and full-blooded presence like Lucinda Williams, whose 1997 concert at the Coach House could serve as an imposing yardstick for all other singer-songwriter performance.

But give Griffith credit. She opened with a pleasant but uninspiring helping of mostly temperate stuff. (“Outbound Plane,” with its sonorous three-chord clang nicked from the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” was an exception, but it mainly made one wish she and her band would pull a nice surprise and actually veer into Pete Townshend’s classic-rock standard.)

Soon enough, though, Griffith was rocking it up (to a degree, anyway), doffing her black sport jacket and confounding expectations with a show of relative spunk and surprising vocal authority.

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The turning point was her cover of Denny’s masterpiece, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” You can make a case for the ill-fated Fairport Convention front-woman as the greatest female rock singer ever, and Griffith sang Denny’s evocative ode to constancy amid life’s uncertainty with impressive strength, dignity and forthrightness. She stumbled only when her bad--but on this night mostly suppressed--habit of tossing in exaggeratedly quirky phrasings made the word “here” sound like a Boston cab driver’s “heeyuh.”

The rest of the set sometimes returned to pleasantly refined but not particularly searing stuff, yet Griffith always seemed to have punches in reserve. Some were her own: a feisty, country-twanger in “Ford Econoline,” her tribute to folkies Kate Wolf and Rosalie Sorrels as emblems of independent womanhood, and the jaunty “Going Back to Georgia,” one of several songs on which band member James Hooker’s burry drawl provided a perfect duet foil to her clean delivery.

She covered Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “Well . . . Alright,” and sang “This Heart,” a romping original patterned after Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”

Griffith brimmed with confidence and authority on Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” which she prefaced by berating Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr for McCarthyite tactics akin to those that got Seeger blacklisted during the 1950s. Somehow, today’s alleged presidential peccadilloes don’t seem comparable to the geopolitical high stakes that touched off witch hunts for suspected communists during the Cold War.

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Griffith received fine instrumental and harmony support from her five-member band, the Blue Moon Orchestra; she announced that guitarist Doug Lancio was playing his last show before leaving to back a younger woman-in-folk (Patti Griffin). Lancio made his last night a good one with country-influenced leads and fills, and Griffith, claiming an absence of fond-goodbye material in her own songbook, turned the microphoneover to harmony singer Lee Satterfield for a tender farewell number, “I Will Not Forget You.”

Can Griffith now lay claim to a title as a folk-rocker? Well . . . no. The proof came in a tepid cover of Thompson’s “Wall of Death.” The song is a paean to risk-taking (“let me take my chances on the Wall of Death”), but Griffith didn’t even risk scaling, and perhaps falling away from, the imposing wall of its high-ranging melody.

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Compare Thompson’s recent solo show at the Coach House, where, following his rocker’s instincts, he got so carried away singing an impassioned “I Feel So Good” that he blew out his voice for the rest of the night. The risk may have been ill-advised, but the one great moment it produced was worth more than a whole show of stuff sung within the comfort zone.

Griffith emphasized material from her four most recent albums, including seven cover tunes from the “Other Voices” collections. That didn’t leave room in her 100-minute set for a couple of delicate gems from her early days, “Love at the Five and Dime” and “There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret),” which might have made for a nice solo-acoustic nightcap.

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Instead, Griffith closed singing alone to a slow horse-clop beat on conga drum, in a rendition of the trad-sounding ‘60s folk nugget “Darcy Farrow,” which Orange County expatriate Steve Gillette and his co-writer, Tom Campbell, loaded with as much romantic pathos as a song can stand.