A Folkie Like Her Parents (OK, Not Exactly Like Them)

“Stop biting your nails,” Martin Carthy scolds his daughter, Eliza, as they and Eliza’s mother, Norma Waterson, pose for a family photo at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.

The daughter rolls her eyes, and an observer might expect more chastising to come. Here are two parents, an earthy pair of sixtysomething English folk singers, with a 25-year-old daughter who is staking her own ground--exhibited physically in her blond-dyed hair, eyelids colored to match her Jell-O red flip-flops, and metal jewelry stuck in her nose and under her lower lip.

Then there’s the path singer-violinist Eliza is taking with music. Her new album, “Angels and Cigarettes,” adds pop production that’s anathema to her parents’ acoustic traditions.

And that’s not to mention the song “The Company of Men,” a frank, remorseful confession of loveless oral sex.

Maybe in some families that would be a problem. Not this one.

“My father provided the melody for [“The Company of Men”] and played guitar on it,” says Eliza after the photo session and before a performance with her parents and accordionist Tim Van Eyken as the group Waterson:Carthy.

“She’s a big girl,” says the elder Carthy. “It’s nothing to do with me what she sings about. And it would be fairly hypocritical of me to say anything against that. It’s not shocking. It’s astonishing that she’s able to communicate those things so affectingly.”

The fact is there’s more sex and violence in the historical English ballads and humorous ditties Waterson:Carthy draw from 400 years of tradition than in both of Eminem’s albums combined. And any assumption that the younger Carthy’s style and subject matter are rebellious is mistaken.

“I guess you have very little to rebel against when your parents are already itinerant musicians,” she says, laughing.

Eliza Carthy’s induction into that life came in her mid-teens. Her parents were already among the most respected figures in English folk before she was born. Martin Carthy was one of the sparks of the English folk revival of the ‘60s. He’s credited with teaching “Scarborough Fair” to Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan used a melody he heard from Carthy for “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” Waterson, her brother Mike and sister Lal were at the forefront of rural balladry as the Watersons.

Growing up on the family’s farm on the north Yorkshire moors, Eliza was surrounded by music--Billie Holiday and Puccini as much as folk songs--as a way of life.

“My mom used the threat of a ‘proper job’ to frighten me--’If you’re not good and eat your greens, a proper job will come and get you,’ ” she says. “They took me to a folk festival in Vancouver when I was 13 or 14 and I was hooked. My mom kind of nagged me to play the violin. I hated it at first, but once I decided I wanted to do it, that was it.”

By 16, she’d formed a duo with fellow teen violinist Nancy Kerr, and with their first independent album in 1994, they were heralded as leaders of a new folk generation. Eliza embraced the role, playing with Kerr, Waterson:Carthy and the more rock-inflected folk band Kings of Calicutt.

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Through it all she was regularly tinkering with new spins on ancient songs, culminating with 1998’s double package of two albums, “Red” and “Rice,” the first one bringing in elements of techno and reggae on a handful of tracks. The package earned her a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize--matching the honor her mother had received just two years before with a solo album of her own.

Though she won praise for several tradition-derived songs she wrote along the way, her focus was by and large on working with old material. She’d never really thought about making songwriting a priority until Andrew Wickham, an executive of Warner Bros. Records in England, approached her when she was 18.

“He said that what interested him most was that at 18 I could command the room,” says Carthy, who performs with her own band at the Getty Center on Friday and the Viper Room on Saturday. “But he said, ‘I don’t know what kind of music you’d do for us. We don’t want traditional music.’ I’d been dabbling with songwriting and said I’d think about it.”

Three years later, Wickham called again. This time, she said yes.

“Why not?” she says. “I’d been given an opportunity for something most people would kill to do.”

But she still had misgivings about trying to write songs from her own experiences.

“I always thought that singer-songwriters were too self-indulgent,” she says. “ ‘Who wants to hear about that?’ But I’ve been singing traditional songs where horrible things happen to people, and if no one wants to hear it, well, it’s 400 years later and we’re still singing them.”

Hence such bald honesty as “The Company of Men,” anchoring a running theme of self-betrayal in romance.

“People really do notice if you’re having them on, if you’re not genuine,” she says. “I’m already coming from a place where I’m set up for a whole bunch of brickbats--sell-out and everything. And the one thing I could make sure is that it was all genuine.”

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The music was more of a searching process, with demos recorded with a variety of producers, including Los Angeles-based Van Dyke Parks. After three more years, the demos themselves were determined worthy of release.

The result is an album that Peter Standish, vice president of marketing for the U.S. wing of Warner Bros. Records, acknowledges is a challenging sell.

“It’s not really a mainstream sound of music, but it’s very high quality music,” says Standish. “The weakness, some people might say, is it doesn’t fit the mold. To me that’s the strength. When you get something like that exposed on the radio, it really gets attention.”

To that end, Warner Bros. turned to European techno act D.N.A., whose remix of Warner artist Loreena McKennitt’s “The Mummer’s Dance” became a mainstream radio hit two years ago, to add some touches to a remix of Carthy’s “Train Song.” That version is already getting enthusiastic responses at several key adult-oriented radio stations around the country.

The press didn’t need that kind of door-opener, though. The album has earned raves from England’s Q magazine, the New York Times and USA Today, along with an A from Entertainment Weekly, which called Carthy “adventurous and brazen.”

But Carthy herself still isn’t satisfied.

“As a lyricist, I’ve certainly discovered what I like,” she says. “As a musician, though, I still haven’t found my niche.”

She’s also not entirely comfortable with her image on the cover of “Angels and Cigarettes,” with flowing dress and a floral, romantic setting a la McKennitt or Enya. Only the dyed hair (blue at the time) and facial jewelry are part of her normal look.

“I’m not too happy with that,” she says, stressing that no one at Warner Bros. forced her into that mold. “In one review, it said, ‘If you like your folk singers in long frocks, Eliza Carthy’s your girl.’ I am not!”

If her parents have any concerns, they are only that solo success could push Waterson:Carthy to the background.

“We would be sad if we didn’t get to play together,” says Martin.

They needn’t worry, Eliza says.

“Not at all. Waterson:Carthy is sacrosanct. I’ll be doing this as long as my parents want.”

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Eliza Carthy plays Friday at the Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, 7:30 p.m. Free. (310) 440-7300. Also Saturday at the Viper Room, 8852 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 10 p.m. $15. (310) 358-1880.