MusicWest conference in Vancouver. At a later conference, they kept getting asked about suggestions that they'd tour together."It was some mysterious person's idea. It was a rumor," Ungerleider laughs at the sequence of events.

"Veda and I were on the same bill at the Folk Alliance (conference) and someone came up to her and said: `I hear Oh Susanna and Kinnie Starr are going on tour with you.' We said, oh, okay. Maybe later."

And so, when Starr and Ungerleider completed a series of dates with Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair tour this summer, they were free to join Hille for this sojourn.

"We thought we should have a bit of interaction. We are kind of learning each others songs and playing on each others songs. So it is fun," she says of the Scrappy Bitches format.

Ungerleider, 27, first made waves after her demo tape was selected by CANOE, the Sun's online service, as the best unsigned act in Canada. That led to a feature in Billboard and, eventually, a self-titled CD release.

The CD is exactly the same as that original demo -- a barebones collection of songs that sound like they could be century-old Library Of Congress field recordings.

Which is understandable, because Ungerleider became fascinated by scholarly folk recordings when she hosted a radio show at Concordia University.

"They were ordinary people singing in that tradition, singing songs that seemed very relevant to their everyday life," she says.

Her own work is invested with the same simplicity and directness.

Songs like All Eyes On Baby have a nursery rhyme structure that hides a deeper lesson about the way women are nudged into meek social roles.

You can practically hear hard-rock miners moaning Roll Me On Home, but it comes from the pen of Ungerleider.

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