Sorrels plays at the Narrows in Fall River on Friday night; above she is seen performing at a 2006 URI Honors Colloquium series on protest music.

Journal FILES/ Glenn Osmundson

In 2004, Rosalie Sorrels released what was supposed to be her farewell album, My Last Go Round. When she came to Stone Soup Coffeehouse that year, longtime Soup emcee Richard Walton said it was “almost certainly her final final appearance in Rhode Island.”

Not so.

The Idaho-born, 74-year-old Sorrels made it to Rhode Island twice in 2006, at the Dunkin’ Donuts Newport Folk Festival (her first Newport appearance in 40 years) and to the Songs of Social Justice colloquium at the University of Rhode Island. Now she’s coming back the general area, anyway, with a show at the Narrows this weekend.

So what gives?

“I was trying to retire, but it didn’t work,” Sorrels says from a tour stop in upstate New York.

“It probably has to do with money as much as anything else. Things are a little skinny, and there’s a kid I want to help. But it’s fine; I’m enjoying it.”

Gamble Rodgers called Sorrels “the hillbilly Edith Piaf,” and he wasn’t wrong. Some dope from the Providence Journal saw her at Newport and wrote, “her matchless voice — without a lot of coloration, but plain and clear and full of strength and dignity — hasn’t lost a thing,” and I wasn’t wrong either. You can hear the miles on Sorrels’ voice, in a good way. She knows what she’s talking about and she knows what she’s singing about.

Sorrels grew up with the folk songs of the Northwest in her house, with a particular interest in the topical, political songs that captured the lives of the people who lived there — the loggers, miners and other workers who made the place unique, and the concerns and the real lives they led.

In her 20s, Sorrels moved with her husband, a lineman, to Salt Lake City after he took a job in the area. Their house was a way station for writers, artists and actors coming through the area, and she started having her five children. “Wanting to do something about my mind,” she started taking extension classes at the University of Utah, including a folklore class with Wayland Hand on the origins of American folk music.

“I just became so enamored of that,” she remembers. “I was just learning to play guitar, and had picked up the rudiments of it. I mean, folk music is easy; it doesn’t take a whole lot of skill.… But this guy gave a whole insight into where it came from and how it was transmitted and the value that it had to the people who use it.”

She was eventually invited to a three-week seminar at UCLA, where she learned about the music during the day and saw folk performers in the clubs and coffeehouses at night. “I just can’t tell you how it pumped my mind up. I probably read every book I could find when I was there.”

When she got back, she started a folk music society in Salt Lake City, brought folk artists in to perform and “became obsessed with it. I got a tape recorder and went out and bothered perfectly nice old people who were minding their own business and asked ‘Give me your old folk songs!’ ”

She made her first album, Folk Songs of Utah and Idaho, in 1959. And that seemed enough. “I expected to stay in Utah for the rest of my life.… but I got so much activity going, and so much recognition, that I began to record some more and get invitations to go and sing other places. And I really was the only person collecting songs from that area of the country.”

Then her marriage broke up in 1966. “I didn’t know how to do anything else, so I made a living doing that.”

Traveling the country singing folk music with five kids in tow? “I had a whole lot of help,” she says now.

She’d settle in certain areas where there was a lot of work to be had. She got help from people such as Malvina Reynolds, who performed with her and gave her work and perspective.

“Whenever I got to feeling sorry for myself, she put me to helping take care of someone who was in a whole lot worse shape than I was. And I think I learned that when people help each other they get a lot more done.”

She spoke at classes in women’s studies to inmates, women with substance abuse and “women who had problems way heavier than mine.” And the work cut both ways. “Just because I actually had [made a break], it made a big difference to them.…

“As long as you’re alive, you can have a spark and you can learn to do something. And it helps you to help other people, because you can see the fruit of your labor right in front of you.”

She continued collecting and recording folk songs and started writing stories and songs “related to my problems, I wrote songs about my kids, songs about what it was like to be cut loose with a whole lot of problems like that. And I probably learned a whole lot more about politics … being poverty-stricken with a whole lot of things to take care of.”

And she continued to travel and perform, thanks in part to the contacts she formed in the folk world when she ran her venue in Salt Lake City. “I established little communities for myself. I felt like I was going home wherever I went. And that’s still true. …

“It’s a very satisfactory thing to know that people remember you, know what you did and want you to do it some more.”

And she’s still at it, intending to record an album of Utah Phillips songs in the near future to benefit the ill singer and songwriter. She lives on seven acres in a cabin that her father built with his own hands, and while My Last Go Round was her farewell to constant touring, she sees no reason to stop playing now: “I think I’ve probably made up my mind that I want to do it as long as I can.”

And playing anti-war concerts, political rallies and the folk circuit, or recording passages from Hunter S. Thompson, she sees a future for the kind of music that she loves — music that arises from daily struggles and people’s responses to them.

“I think folk music is something you make when you need it, not for any other reason. So I think it always comes back. When the need arises, it’ll raise its head and raise its voice. I don’t think it behaves like other music that goes away. It never goes away.”

Rosalie Sorrels is at the Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River, tomorrow night at 8. Tickets are $20 in advance, $23 the day of the show. Call (508) 324-1926.

Neko Case at Lupo’s

Chanteuse Neko Case makes country music indie-rock fans can love. Her latest, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, mixes a dusky, downbeat feeling and a clear yet sorrowful delivery, with a few highlight-worthy, catchy mid-tempo bouncers such as “The Needle Has Landed.” She’s at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington St., Providence, tonight at 8. Tickets are $24; call (401) 331-5876.