A band oozes into a languid two-step country blues, lilted by a harmonica and the resonant twang of a guitar played slack-key style. The singer joins on the upbeat, her voice girlish but smoky, lazy but conversational, open-throated and tremulous but clear. It’s a song she wrote about a long-term relationship: “If I were to leave you, would you miss me, come and kiss me, then let me go, it’s only heartache, I know...” sung as if the words have just occurred to her. So informal and “unstyled” is her delivery that it takes a little while until Pegi Young’s performance commands the attention it deserves.

Young is only now stepping into the spotlight to perform songs she has been writing most of her life. Her first concert tour in front of her own band begins at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur June 22; her self-titled debut CD is being released on Tuesday, June 26. She wrote most of its 11 songs, some more than 30 years ago.

“I wrote some of them when I was 20 years old,” she says. “I can still relate to them in my 50s. I hope they have a universality to them: They’re stories that can still be told by a woman who has lived and experienced what I had only begun to know then.”

Young says several practical factors postponed her debut.

“I’d been singing and playing guitar for a long time, mostly for myself, never did any performing. Children got born, other things needed to be done,” she says. “Other things” included the co-founding of the Bridge School in 1986 for kids like her son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy. She ran the school—now internationally known for research and education of children with special needs—as its unpaid director for its first six years and is still president of its board. She and husband of 30 years, Neil Young, established a foundation to support the school and continue to organize an annual fundraiser, The Bridge School Benefit, which has become one of Northern California’s most sought-after rock events.  

(Ben now runs an organic farm. Their daughter, Amber, just graduated from university in Ohio. “The first Young to graduate from college,” says Pegi, who dropped out of community college at 17. In 2006, Pegi and Neil were awarded honorary doctorates by San Francisco State University for their Bridge School work. “But, I went to the school of life,” Pegi affirms.)

Pegi’s first live stage performance came in 1994 at the Academy Awards, singing backup for Neil, who was nominated for “Philadelphia.” From 2000 on she toured internationally with him and his band. Some Crazy Horse alums perform on her CD along with writer/keyboard artist Spooner Oldman, steel key guitar great Ben Keith, guitarist Anthony Crawford and bassist Rick Rosas—the last three of whom are her core touring band.

“The four of us will tour,” she says, “and if we do TV, the whole gang will join us.” The gang includes Neil, who sings and plays guitar and sitar, Mary Stuart on the mandolin, and the Jordinaires.

The songs are about living and loving, subjects a 20-year-old thinks she knows all about, as Pegi did when she wrote “Love Like Water,” in which she describes an all-consuming youthful passion: “Your love to me’s like water, I can’t live without it, die without it, die without it.” The driving 4:4 rock beat of the song changes boldly at the chorus, when a distinctly Eastern tonal progression is repeated in a staccato rhythm, with the solo melody picked out by Neil Young playing the sitar. It’s a gutsy song that insists on staying in your head.

Pegi wrote “White Line in the Sun” after a hitchhiking journey, “just the road, the cars, and me.” The lazy rhythm of the harmonica and steel guitar create a swampy pull on the words.

Her male chorus is having as much fun as she is on “Party Life,” a rollicking honkytonk jam:  “When I dance, everybody steps aside, I romance, everybody wants to ride, that’s right, I like the party life.”

The last track is Spooner Oldman’s “I’m Not Through Lovin’ You Yet,” a kind of noir country song in which the drum vamps while a surreal chorus of the Jordinaires slide it into homage territory as they hum in tight harmony, “I guess it’s over for you, I’m not through lovin’ you yet.”

As her career changes, Pegi continues to write all the time. Not counting Pegi Young, she has 30 new tracks completed—and only discovered the electric guitar recently. “These songs on the CD went pretty deep, I have a hard time projecting where the next ones will go,” she says. “I don’t have the music to all of them yet. The subjects just come up.

“I guess it’s my observation of the human condition—a little shred of something I hope is more universal, not just about me.”

PEGI YOUNG plays the Henry Miller Library, Highway 1, five miles south of Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park in Big Sur, at 7:30pm Friday, June 22. $37. 667-2574.