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The latest stop in Michelle Shocked’s rambles around the United States is New Orleans, and she has begun to go native. On Monday night at CBGB, she led a band stooped in funk and the blues, and she sang about Louisiana subjects from the chemical pollution around Lake Charles to the jubilant funeral of a boy shot dead in a New Orleans housing project. She has also absorbed something more: the spirit of music as a communal event, where bringing pleasure to a roomful of listeners is more important than promoting songs or CDs.

After spending the late 1980s and early ‘90s recording for a major label, Mercury, Ms. Shocked has gone back to the classic role of the itinerant grassroots musician. Her current album, Good News (Mood Swing), is available only at her shows, and it’s packaged in one folded sheet of paper.

Through her career, she has been a student of genres, from folk-rock to jump-blues to Appalachian tunes; she’s content to add her own words to old forms. She has taken to blues and funk with typical enthusiasm. She yowls and whoops, grinning with delight; she sends the band on long excursions with solos, call-and-response and audience participation rump-shaking. Her band also recharges her older material, from the folk-rock of “Anchorage” to the hoedown of “Prodigal Daughter (Cotton Eyed Joe).” She even induced the CBGB audience to swing their partners.

Amid the good time grooves, Ms. Shocked sang about notions no less serious than love, death, truth, and faith: a lusty rendezvous, memories of a daughter who died, a denunciation of tabloid news, an argument with anti-homosexual preachings. There’s a gospel streak in Ms. Shocked’s music; her album package unfolds to the shape of a cross, and onstage she said, “I’ve been going to church a lot.” Her encore, sung in a cappella harmony with her band, summed up her convictions, proclaiming, “Can’t Take My Joy.”

CBGB originally stood for Country Bluegrass Blues, and with Ms. Shocked in town, even the punk club found its roots.