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“Are you indulging me a little?” Michelle Shocked asked her audience at the 9:30 Club Sunday night. Well, yes, you could say that. In fact, the crowd was clearly willing to overlook the countless false starts, missed cues, abrupt finishes and deflected requests that punctuated the sprawling show in return for a thoroughly spontaneous performance. Besides, how often do you hear a singer-songwriter with a strong affinity for Appalachian music exuberantly performing and choreographing soul classics like “Cool Jerk” and “Brick House?”

Backed by her new three-piece soul band, the Anointed Earls (a Southern corruption of “anointed oils”), Shocked spent most of her time onstage raising the crowd’s spirits but not before trying to raise its awareness of what she called “environmental racism” in Louisiana. A short Greenpeace film titled “Cancer Alley” prefaced her band’s performance and served as the inspiration for the title track of her new limited-edition CD, Good News. “This used to be God’s country – Heaven on Earth, peace in the valley – now they call it “Cancer Alley,” she declared in a voice at once searing and sorrowful.

For the most part, though, Shocked seem intent on having a good time, singing robustly, dancing wildly and constantly urging the crowd to do the same. The ensuing funkathon hardly suited some of her best-known tunes, but she squeezed in a laconic version of “Anchorage” and unveiled a few new songs that revealed Good News to be something more than the “glorified demo” she described it to be.