Back On Top Michelle Shocked Wins Fight With Record Label, Releases Triumphant New Album

Michelle Shocked’s new CD,”Kind Hearted Woman,” is a musical and personal triumph.

As powerful as anything she has created in her career, “Kind Hearted Woman” is a stirring - and often harrowing - account of life in rural America.

But just as important, it represents Shocked’s victory over record-label greed: After four years of peddling a basement-tapes version at concerts because her label wouldn’t release it, Shocked is finally able to deliver her fourth legitimate record to the world at large.

Like Neil Young, who stood up to David Geffen, and Prince, who battled with Warner Brothers, Shocked went toe-to-toe with Mercury Records and won the day.

Shocked will appear with her band, the Casualties of Wah, at The Met Saturday.

In her version of the conflict with Mercury, it was headstrong artist against heartless corporation: Her original contract provided her only with a small advance but gave her ownership of her master tapes. Three records into a seven-record contract, Mercury decided it wasn’t making enough money on her music, so they simply stopped cooperating.

At first, they cited “stylistic inconsistency,” but finally admitted they didn’t like the terms of the original agreement. Shocked had to sue.

“I filed a lawsuit in August of ‘95 that challenged Mercury under the California labor laws enacted to prevent indentured servitude,” she told a reporter recently. “It opened a can of worms, and then they returned phone calls and negotiated a settlement.”

Now, she has a two-record deal with Private Records and is free to call her own shots. If history is any teacher, they will be formidable.

Shocked was a Texas-born teenage runaway who mesmerized fans with her 1988 debut, “Short Sharp Shocked.” She followed that with a big band record, “Captain Swing,” and “Arkansas Traveler,” an omnibus of Southern influences that featured performances by such personal heroes as Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Norman Blake and Levon Helm.

Most recently, Shocked has been working on an R&B record with Tony! Toni! Tone! keyboardist Carl Wheeler, and she wants to cut a record in tribute to the music of her adopted home, New Orleans.

“How I see myself is a funky white girl who brings a lot to the party,” she said.

The relationship between race and music seems to have become central to Shocked’s world view. True to her Southern roots, and perhaps as a reaction to the racial aspects of her Mormon upbringing, Shocked has become something of a crusader for tearing down musical barriers.

“In the ‘20s and ‘30s, when music first started being recorded,” she told an interviewer, “you could take the same song performed by white musicians, and it was called hillbilly or jug-band music, and the same songs performed by black musicians were sold as race music or blues.

“As an American musician, you’re selling yourself short if you’re allowing yourself to be put into one single genre.”

If, in fact, her next record is a funky one, it will stand in deep contrast to “Kind Hearted Woman.” Deeply rural, the album’s inflections are Appalachian and Southern, though its reality and protagonists could be black or white.

Its subject matter is struggle and transcendence, and it opens with a song called “Stillborn,” which chronicles the day in the life of a midwife who has just helped deliver a stillborn child.

“Kind Hearted Woman” touches on the plight of women in rural America, on the vagaries of weather and crops, on death, drink and the pain of coming to terms with the hardness of life.

But there’s also redemption, and for Shocked the redemption is in the music. Her concerts have been defined in terms that approach the spiritual.

“It seemed miraculous,” Roberta Penn wrote in the Seattle Weekly, “500 fans standing quietly, body to body in the sweltering womb that is Moe’s. Perhaps they knew that after Michelle Shocked’s two-and-a-half-hour show, they would be reborn.”

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Michelle Shocked will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at The Met. Tickets are $12.40 and $14.50, available at Street Music, G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.