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At least in affairs of the heart, America’s outspoken folk singer and writer Michelle Shocked is changing her tune.

The 29-year-old Texan, who confesses she’s had a tough life since running away from a strict Mormon upbringing at the age of 12 and again at 16, now has some new goals, such as marrying her fiancé Bart, an American journalist, and perhaps doing something she vowed she would never do – raise a family.

“I always said I wouldn’t get married, but I am, so maybe I’ll have children as well,” she says in a soft, Texan drawl.

“One thing’s for sure: if I do have children they’ll have a solid stable home life, something I didn’t really.”

Shocked speaks quietly when talking of her family.

She has only one sibling of the same parents, and more than seven half-brothers and sisters.

Teaming with the Australian band, The Messengers, she is now at the start of her second Australian tour.

On her first tour of Australia last year, she was accompanied on stage by her father, ‘One Dollar Bill,’ [sic] highlighting songs from her first two albums, The Texas Campfire Tapes and Short Sharp Shocked.

The pair then fulfilled Bill’s lifetime dream by sailing around the Whitsunday Islands in North Queensland.

This might conjure images of a close family and happy upbringing, but she says her childhood years were full of frustration and confusion.

Until she was 15, she spent her years travelling around Army bases with her mother and stepfather.

At 16, she ran away from home for the last time and later went to live with her father in Dallas.

“I had always spent summers there with him going to bluegrass festivals and back porch picking sessions,” she says.

“My time there was my introduction to music beyond the fundamentalist environment of my mother’s house.”

She was plucked from obscurity into fame five years ago while singing folk songs around a campfire at a volunteer folk festival.

“An English chap by the name of Pete Lawrence requested a few of the tunes he’d heard me play at a campfire the night before,” she says. “I recorded them into his Sony Walkman.”

Lawrence recorded it on his Cooking Vinyl label as an album, The Texas Campfire Tapes, and she was invited to London for a short tour in January 1987.

Recorded on weak batteries and complete with chirruping crickets, it went to number one within a few weeks and remained in the charts for almost a year.

Its success created the opportunity for Shocked to record her second album, Short Sharp Shocked, released in 1988 by PolyGram.

Her stage name was coined before her first album. In 1984, she was arrested at a Republican Party convention in Dallas. As the story goes, a friend at the rally asked her: “How do you feel, ‘Chelle?” Back came the reply: “Shocked.”

“I did not adjust well to Reagan’s America,” she says. “From my first days as a runaway I continued to exist close to the edges of homelessness. Later, in San Francisco, I joined ranks with squatters who settled into buildings left vacant by real estate speculators.

“In New York and Amsterdam, my involvement grew as I saw hope for solutions to developers’ redlined ghettoes.”

It was while she was still an activist in the squatter movement that she learned that her first album was number 26 on the British charts.

Her liking for black clothes, she explains, is not because she’s a slave to fashion – “in my earlier years I was” – but because black doesn’t show the marks.

The only sign her music shows of her earlier life on the streets is that the songs she writes have underlying political messages addressing the problems of society including poverty, racism, and degradation of the environment.

Now with her third album, Captain Swing, to her credit, her reputation as a talented and outspoken entertainer has put her in the same left-field league as Tracy Chapman, Sinéad O’Connor, and Billy Bragg.

Although the album is far less political than the first two, it denotes class struggle in Britain.

Captain Swing ups the ante, she says. “The title has a double meaning, and that’s the reason for the wink on the album cover. I have a boat and I play swing, and that’s the obvious take.

“But probably pretty obscure is that in the 19th century a movement called Captain Swing arose where peasants would rise up and burn the threshing machines of the wealthy landowner. They left notes signed, ‘Captain Swing.’

“They would throw their sabots – their wooden shoes – into the weaving mills. That’s how the word ‘sabotage’ came about.”

Music, she says, should flow like the Mississippi River.

In her own work she sees influences from Otis Rush, Bob Wills, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Dixieland, NYC Bebop, Delta Blues, and even African palm wine music.

“It’s a little bit of rock, lots of roots,” she says. “And recently I’ve started drawing on the inspiration of traditional music – fiddle tunes that originally don’t have lyrics. I write my own lyrics.”

Her most political songs do not appear to be political.

“Take “On The Greener Side,” she says. “Although green is associated with political causes, the environmental groups have finally found a way to achieve the swing vote.

And the song, “[Don’t You Mess Around With] My Little Sister” isn’t about my little sister. She’s 16 and thinks it is, but it’s about the States in America.”

Michelle Shocked will perform at the Tasmania University Union Activities Centre on Saturday night.