Michelle Shocked never did know what she wanted to be when she grew up: a skateboard punk rocker, an anarchist squatter, a hippie folkie or simply an adult woman. As it is, she's come full circle from the mythological waxing of her 1986 debut, The Texas Campfire Tapes. After one album of gutsy blues and country-flavored folk rock and another of gratuitous Forties-style jazz, Arkansas Traveler finds her waxing mythological again.

The album takes her across America's highways in a Winnebago in search of her musical roots. She records in Woodstock, New York, with former members of the Band; at a Wilkesboro, North Carolina, bluegrass festival with picker Doc Watson; on a Mississippi riverboat near St. Louis with the punk-bluegrass trio Uncle Tupelo. She takes fiddler Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown into Sun Studios and flies to Ireland and Australia to jam with two folk-rock groups, the Hothouse Flowers and the Messengers. It's an ambitious itinerary, and Shocked's unflagging enthusiasm is a bit overwhelming at times. Still, this kind of generation-busting hasn't seemed so right since the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band gathered the tribes for Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Arkansas Traveler kicks off with Pops Staples's stinging guitar on "33 RPM Soul," but the song reveals only Shocked's weakness as an R&B singer and writer. She's more comfortable with folk, blues and bluegrass, and the best tunes are her gender-updated standards, like "Prodigal Daughter (Cotton Eyed Joe)," with fiddler Alison Krauss, and "Hold Me Back (Frankie and Johnny)," with Gatemouth Brown. Taj Mahal's background grunts and guitar playing give "Jump Jim Crow" an edge that Shocked's solo blues sometimes lacks, and on "Secret to a Long Life," recycled from Shocked's first album, Levon Helm's croon in the background lends the wisdom of the refrain ("The secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to go") a measure of credibility.

In her liner notes, Shocked holds forth on how roots music was shanghaied by whites from African Americans. Aside from being obvious and simplistic, it's just plain unnecessary. The collaborations on Arkansas Traveler communicate much more than mere rhetoric. (RS 630)

MARK KEMP