In the title track of her first solo record, Flying Jenny, Linda McRae wrote about two brothers, Ira and Charlie Louvin, who mined the mournfulness of the Alabama backwoods in a way that would change country music forever. And now, on her new Long Shadow Trail, McRae is singing about another rustic troubadour, Charlie Parr. But while the Louvin Brothers were active during the 1940s and ’50s, Parr is alive today. And while the siblings were entertainers at heart, Parr splits his time between playing on-stage and helping the homeless.

The difference is telling. While vintage roots music is McRae’s chief inspiration, Long Shadow Trail finds the singer, guitarist, banjo player, and accordionist choosing to be more fully engaged with today’s world. It’s a wiry, charged record, with producer Steve Dawson’s guitars at the forefront, and it finds McRae telling stories that have risen from the streets, from prison cells, and from her own generous heart.

Like Parr, she wants to create fine folk art while making a difference in how we humans treat each other—and ourselves.

McRae first stumbled on the hero of her song “Charlie Parr” at the Porcupine Mountains Music Festival in northern Michigan, but seeing him perform was less revelation than reinforcement. Having endured tough times of her own, McRae has always empathized with society’s less fortunate. Her band Spirit of the West was long the go-to group for environmental and social-justice benefit concerts here in her former hometown, and her own quiet activism is so inseparable from her art that it even resulted in another of Long Shadow Trail’s dozen songs, “Flowers of Appalachia”. The singer’s relaxed banjo and lilting voice support a lyric penned by Ken Blackburn, a convict she met while she and her husband, poet James Whitmire, were giving concerts and workshops in California’s New Folsom State Prison.

“We were invited there in 2011 to be part of the Arts in Corrections program,” McRae explains, on the line from her home near Nashville, Tennessee. “I played a bunch of different shows in different parts of the prison, and all the inmates were so engaged! They were asking really intelligent questions—questioning things in a way that made me look at what we were doing in a completely new light.”

Spurred on by those encounters, McRae and Whitmire have since formalized their community-engagement activities, offering Express Yourself writing workshops to at-risk youth in prisons, detox centres, and community facilities across Canada and the United States.

“Most of these kids, they don’t have a voice. They don’t have anyone who gives any credence to their ideas or what they have to say,” the songwriter explains, adding that both she and Whitmire know what it’s like to be in that place. He’s a former alcoholic who’s been sober for 27 years; she was a teenage mother and the daughter of an alcoholic father.

“Kids really relate to us because we’re not threatening,” she adds. “We’re just trying to help them find an alternative, a way to put all that angst and anger into making good choices, instead of the wrong choices.”

Judgment plays no part in her tunes, however. “You really have no idea where life’s going to take you,” McRae says. “There’s really no road map of your life, and depending on which way you go, you’re going to have a completely different experience.”

What the road ahead holds for this Canadian-born, Tennessee-based songwriter, no one can tell. But by choosing music, justice, and redemption, she’s on the right track.

Linda McRae plays a Rogue Folk Club show at St. James Community Hall on Friday (November 27).