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This concert was a joy. Michele Shocked's voice, her adept and relaxed guitar playing, her songwriting and her stories, her body movements, her broad smile, all contributed to an overwhelming sense of delight and absorption in life.

Shocked's songs range from the mundane - learning to drive a car, sweet potato pies, making strawberry jam and letter writing - to the overtly political.

Her protest song, "Graffiti Limbo," - about police brutality and racism in New York - worked because of the anger conveyed by the singer.

That Shocked looks and sounds so much like a folk singer is reinforced by the everday subjects she colours with generous emotion.

It was a night when simple sensations, human intimacy seemed to reverberate through the audience. It was not all love and understanding but was certainly not sentimental folky warmth for its own sake. It was sometimes stark, stripped of the surging joy of Shocked's recent recordings.

If anything, the concert was the American folk tradition seen in full bloom in 1990. Here was Peter [sic] Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Guy Clark, Bessie Smith, and Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), all present and accounted for.

Here too, was the reawakening of a folk music revival that could have political repercussions in the future.

With Michelle Shocked, as with other solo singers, there is a belief that human warmth can still be generated from music and this music can then mobilise people. It is an important change from rock-and-roll entertainers to entertainment with a heart.

When Shocked's father, "Bill," came on stage to accompany his daughter on mandolin, it was a further reminder that things are changing - that the generation gap of Bob Dylan's era has been left behind and that all generations now unite to create songs that herald a better, more humane future.