Courtesy of Nanci Griffith   Guest artist: Nanci Griffith, whose songs include "Love at the Five and Dime," "Lone Star State of Mind" and "From a Distance," will play at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 6, and 9 p.m. Sunday, April 9, at Centennial Hall.

The conflict had a profound effect on her childhood. Her stepfather - twice a prisoner of war in World War II -Êwas also sent to fight in Korea.

"He came home and hung up his uniform and began studying Gandhi," Griffith said. "He taught me, my entire life, the basics of true pacifism."

Griffith, the guest artist for the 32nd Alaska Folk Festival, has recorded 17 albums, earned five Grammy nominations, won one Grammy, written a book and had the distinct honor of having her version of the Julie Gold song, "From a Distance," played for orbiting astronauts.

In the last seven years, she's toured Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bosnia, Kosovo and Angola with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundations, the Campaign for a Landmine Free World and the Mines Advisory Group, a nonprofit based in the United Kingdom. She also has visited with veterans of the current war in Iraq.

"Being a witness is very important, and being able to pass on what I've seen and how much our Vietnam veterans have given back to the world is very important to me," Griffith said. "I've visited Walter Reed (hospital) and been able to talk to soldiers who have been so terribly wounded by this war.

"I don't believe in war anywhere, anytime or for any reason, and this is my way of supporting our troops," she said. "If you love freedom, President Bush, free our troops from an illegal conflict and bring them home."

Griffith was born July 6, 1953, in Seguin, Texas, near San Antonio, and grew up in Austin. Her father loved folk music, and her mother was into jazz.

"I guess you would consider them to be beatniks - they were too early to be hippies," Griffith said. "From a very early age, I loved Buddy Holly and the Crickets. I loved Woody Guthrie. And later on, I discovered Loretta Lynn on my own. I huddled with my transistor radio every Saturday night to hear the Grand Ole Opry, hoping Loretta would be on there.

"It was the message in her music," she said. "That you can do more. You don't have to put up with anything. You can be anything you want to be."

Griffith's stepfather, a piano player in a barbershop quartet, tried to encourage her to play the piano. But she was already smitten with guitar, thanks to "Folk Guitar," a Saturday morning PBS show hosted by Laura Weber.

"It was a lot more interesting to watch and learn how to play guitar with Ms. Laura than it was to watch cartoons on Saturday morning," Griffith said.

Guitar, unlike piano, came naturally. The first song she learned was "What's That I Hear," the Phil Ochs song that Weber used as her theme. From there, she turned to her rockabilly heroes, in particular Buddy Holly.

guest artist who: nanci griffith. when: 8 p.m. thursday, 10:30 a.m. saturday (workshop q&a) and 9 p.m. sunday night. where: centennial hall.

"At first I was just basically learning how to finger-pick, and then I would sit down and listen to the Crickets record and try to emulate Buddy Holly's guitar style, which was just straight rhythm," Griffith said. "Even if he was playing a lead guitar part, it was still rhythm. It developed into my own style. I have a pretty unusual style of playing, and it's a combination of all these things."

Imitation helped her develop a style, but Griffith soon discovered it was much easier for her to write her own material. There was no lack of influences -Êher parents took her to Austin shows.

The year she was 14 was memorable. Her dad brought her to see Townes Van Zandt. Songwriter Tom Russell began trumpeting her cause after hearing her play during a campfire song circle at a festival in Kerrville, Texas. And she secured her first gig in Austin, a Thanksgiving holiday show at the Red Lion.

By her late teens, Griffith was playing rhythm guitar and singing backup at clubs all over Austin. She stayed in town to study toward an education degree at the University of Texas, and continued to play around town. Shortly after the now-legendary Hole in The Wall club opened in 1974, Griffith was offered a weekly Sunday night spot. She played there for five years, even as she was teaching kindergarten and first-grade during the week.

"I was playing a combination of different things, mostly my own material," Griffith said. "I've always done a lot of Crickets' songs. I loved Townes Van Zandt. I've always loved Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker.

"It just amazed me that I was being allowed to make a living and do what I wanted - to be inspired by other artists," she said. "When you get to do what you want to do, and you enjoy it and it becomes your life work, then that's why we call it 'playing.'"

Griffith's first three studio recordings showed up on a 1977 sampler compilation for the start-up label B.F. Deal Records. She released her first full-length album, "There's a Light Beyond These Woods," in 1978. She gave up teaching that year.

"I didn't finish playing at the club until 2 in the morning, and then I had to get up at 6 and get ready to go teach school," she said. "One of them had to go."

Another independent release followed -Ê1982's "Poet in My Window." That led her to Nashville in 1984, where she began playing with a handful of session players, including a young Bela Fleck. In 1985, Philo and Rounder Records released her third album, "Once in a Very Blue Moon." She assembled her own band, The Blue Moon Orchestra, for "Last of the True Believers" in 1986.

The album was nominated for a Grammy, and Kathy Mattea's cover of one of the songs, "Love at the Five and Dime," ran all the way to No. 3 on the country Billboard charts. Mattea's version was nominated for Best Country Song of the Year, which scored Griffith a major-label contract with MCA.

Her 1987 "Lone Star State of Mind," produced by Tony Brown, had two major hits. The title track landed in the country top 40 and "From a Distance," written by Julie Gold, hit No. 1 in the United Kingdom. Three years later, Bette Milder covered the song, turned it into a mega-hit and sold more than a million copies of her "Some People's Lives."

"Tony Brown never pressured me at all," Griffith said. "I really appreciated it and I still think of him as one of the greatest heroes in my career. I was very much in control of the material that I was writing and how records were produced and I still am. I guess I would never have been receptive to anybody trying to instruct me on how to build an image or what to record. I've just been real lucky that the music industry has allowed me to really run amok."

Rolling Stone dubbed Griffith "The Queen of Folkabilly" in 1988. She's released 12 more records since then, the best known being 1994's "Flyer."

In 1993, she won the Best Contemporary Folk Album Grammy for "Other Voices, Other Rooms," 17 songs by some her favorite folk performers. She recorded a sequel, "Other Voice, Too" in 1998, and wrote a companion book, "Other Voices - A Personal History of Folk Music" in 1998.

Later this year, she plans to record a torch album, covering Tom Waits and Jimmy Webb, among others.

"I've always been a big fan of Tom Waits," Griffith said. "He had some songs from his records that I have always wanted to record, and then I remember that I have all of these wonderful jazz songs and tunes that I grew up hearing my stepfather play. I really wanted to do those as well."