"I FEEL if I didn't have a spiritual belief I wouldn't bother to open my mouth and sing," says Iris DeMent, unpicking her thoughts slowly in her rich Arkansas accent. "To me separating the music and the soul of the human being is an impossibility.
The life of this 36 year old singer of a brand of music loosely filed under "progressive country" could be titled "Parables from the American South". Born into a family of 11 children in rural Arkansas, she was brought up going to the Pentecostal and Assemblies of God churches up to three times a week. She broke with the church when she was 16, but the highly original songs on her three albums on the Warner label, Infamous Angel, My Life (a Rolling Stone album of the year) and The Way I Should call on a colourful religious vocabulary to work out a personal redemption.
The sleeve notes for My Life, titled "Dad", are like a wonderful magic realist parable for this break with the expected, and this embrace of music - except that the story is true: "Sometime, before I was born, my Dad had been a fiddler," she writes. "I don't know who told me. I just know that I have known it since as far back as I can remember. Later in my life, I learned that the reason I had never seen my Dad's fiddle or heard him play was because when he got saved, he put his fiddle away.
When Iris was eight or nine she made a discovery in her parents closet: "As soon as I had the box in my hands I knew that I had found my Dad's fiddle. I don't remember ever contemplating the connection between getting saved and `putting the fiddle away', but I knew that getting saved meant, among other things, doing away with sin. When God had come in, the fiddle had gone out, and so, I must have concluded that there was something sinful about the fiddle. Maybe that is why, after looking at if for a brief time, I suddenly became very nervous, shoved it back up on the shelf and Cot out of there as quickly as I could."
Curiosity finally over came her: "Then one day, something came over me and instead of putting the fiddle back on the shelf, I carried it right straight into the living room. My Dad was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper, and I asked him if he would play a song. Some of what happened that day is lost to my memory forever, but other things made such an impression that I never forgot them. I remember, first of all, that he was not mad and that, he looked at me for a long time before reaching over and taking the box from my hands and resting it on his lap. I remember that he turned it over and studied it from every angle and then sat for awhile longer with his open hand rested on the top be fore finally releasing the latch. After he opened it, he sat looking at the fiddle so long that I remember thinking he might not even take it out."
Finally he lifted the instrument out of its case and began to play, but he had lost his skill: "Having never heard a fiddle before," writes Iris, "I thought it sounded pretty good, but after only a few bars, he stopped and said: `I'm sorry, honey, I can't do it'." Although it was the guitar and the piano which Iris taught herself to play, you could see breaking the social and emotional locks which kept the music in that fiddle case as her life's work.
THE break with the church and the first steps on Iris's path to her own kind of glory, came after some years of doubts: "I saw the preacher driving around in a new Cadillac and I thought that spending $30,000 on a fancy car doesn't go with Jesus's message of feeding the poor and helping people." Generous offerings from her father's subsistence wage had helped fund the new car, she noted.
So a political conscience began to grow in her, which has led her to write in her latest album, some of the most heart ending, most blistering attacks on the American political system that you are ever likely to hear. To a heavy, percussive accompaniment, her clear voice blares out the chorus: "Living in the Wasteland of the Free/ Where the poor have now become the enemy/ Let's blame our troubles on the weak ones/ Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy/,Living in the Wasteland of the Free.
Her first two albums were made up mostly of songs about private emotions, and the combination of a stunning voice, beautiful melodies and moving lyrics quickly won her a fan base which includes country, stars such as Nanci Griffith, John Prine and Merle Haggard. The latest album strikes a new, public note: "I" decided to talk in my music about, certain things which affect me, and not shy away. Up to now, I didn't know how and I was afraid," she says. "When you write about things which affect other people as well as yourself you stand a good chance of being disapproved of. I don't like people not liking me. Or wanting to burn my house down."
Yes, of course she's exaggerating, she agrees. But it has been hard that some people close to her have been offended by songs on The Way I Should. Sometimes she feels offended herself. Then she thinks again about the political and social issues she raises, and she feels "the same darn way".
"We're told from when we're little that we're the best," she says of her American upbringing. "And `Why bother to fix something when we're so darn near perfect?'" Gradually, ethics are being eroded: "The political upper crust get there on the big guys money. And people just think `that's how it is.'"
And so starts another of Iris DeMent's American fables: "My father and mother both came from a farming background in Arkansas. My father had to move into town to work in a factory when he stopped earning enough from the farm. First he worked eight hours, then 10, then 12. If they needed him to do two shifts, they'd ask him to do two shifts."
Finally, the workers went on strike to get the right to form a union and fight for reasonable conditions: "They stuck it for a year and we just about starved to death. And they lost." Farming, she says, is "darn near a thing of the past" and factory jobs pay less and less: "The people at the bottom suffer most, and that's the American way.
Her family moved to California, where her father worked as a janitor and a gardener. But the local church was a jealously guarded island of the South, where Iris was profoundly influenced by the old four part harmonies of Gospel music and powerful stories of "people just trying to get through". She also learned, she says, about being emotional, about "this world beneath the skin: If you needed something, you could cry and say, `I need something'."
As well as Gospel music, she listened to country and to folk, and these influences came together when she began to strum on the guitar and learn the piano from her brothers and sisters: "When you're poor you send one child to lessons and make sure they study real well so that they can pass it on," she explains.
She remembers jumping up and down with delight when she wrote her first song - but doesn't remember the song. The third song was the first which stuck, Our Town on Infamous Angel, a beautiful elegy for a dying Southern town. Finally, at the age of 25, she had that "calling", that sense of "God knocking me on the head" which her parents' religion had taught her to wait for. She moved to Nashville, and sang her songs at as many "open mikes as she could until she got a record deal. Then she moved to Kansas city, where she met and married Elmer, who gave up his job as a fireman to manage her career.
One of her new songs, Quality Time, is a trenchant attack on parents who work so hard for the accoutrements of a successful American couple that they have no time for their children. She has no children yet, but might she end up living like that herself?
"I think I'll probably be dragging my kids around with me and they'll end up hating me," she admits. "But I like the idea of my kids being with me."
It will certainly take more than a cradle full to keep this woman from a career she pursues with a passionate, spiritual conviction: "It's a really good feeling for about 10 minutes after you've written a song. The world feels right. You feel, `I'm going to be all right and everyone I know is going to be all right.' There's something about taking nothing and creating something. I think of music as a live thing with a personality of its own and when music and I get together, which doesn't happen very often, it's wonderful."