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There is a horde of musicians out there who’ll tell you how critical it is to use an acoustic guitar to create rock tunes.

But many of them would make fools of themselves on stage armed only with an acoustic guitar, with no band behind them, plunking out barebones arrangements of their hollow, chart-busting tunes.

East Texas bluegrass punkster, Michelle Shocked, won over a huge number of converts with her fluid singing style and stellar Western-swing and bluesy band arrangements on her Short Sharp Shocked album in 1988.

At Barrymore’s Wednesday night, after rollicking along for more than an hour with U.K. new traditionalists, The Oyster Band, who had the audience bobbing and weaving with their mix of rock ‘n’ reel, some members of the packed house seemed startled by the fact that except for a microphone and a guitar resting on a chair, the stage was bare when Shocked’s late-night set was about to begin.

But as she strummed the opening chords to “When I Grow Up” from the side of the stage and came galloping out to complete the song, there was no doubt that Shocked is a performer who has clout with or without a band backing her up.

Despite her rural background, Shocked has a worldly presence. The former skateboard punker and squatter has lived through hard times, but doesn’t ask for sympathy, nor does she club the audience over the head with her political wish list now that she’s entrenched in social idealism.

Dressed in a turtleneck, black tights and a Lennon-style peaked cap, the reedy singer had a voice to match her stature: frail at times, but capable of creating a strong charge of electricity. Her between-song commentary was sometimes spoken so softly that it forced the rock club audience to settle down, straining to catch her quick wit.

“Folk music? You’re soaking in it,” she mused at one point, in a play on the dish detergent commercial. She finished many of her well-known numbers, such as “Anchorage,” with a twinkling smile and a flourish.

But there was plenty of grit, namely in “Graffiti Limbo,” the story of a young black man allegedly killed in New York by police officers after he was arrested for spray-painting in the subway. And, in the a cappella, “Ballad of Penny Evans,” the soul-wrenching plea of a young wife whose husband was killed in Vietnam, which deservedly received the biggest ovation of the night.

“Ah, hope this song offends some of y’all,” Shocked drawled as she introduced “Campus Crusade,” a melancholy look at shopping mall Christians bent on saving us from the fires of Hell.

Musically, though, she saved the best for last, when her “band” joined her on stage. That was when she closed the main part of her set with her train trilogy, starting with “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” and culminating with “If Love Was A Train,” accompanied by her guitar roadie on slide.

A bit of showbiz finesse wound things up in her second encore, in a rendition of “The Secret to a Long Life (is knowing when it’s time to go).” “I mean it this time,” she sang, and with that, Shocked bounded off stage and out the back door to her tour bus, the electricity of her performance still charging the air.