TORONTO -- Since the release last winter of her debut full-length album, Johnstown, re-living tragedy has become a nightly task for Suzie Ungerleider -- stage name: Oh Susanna.

Fortunately, the Toronto-based singer-songwriter is re-living it on stage from the safe distance of 110 years.

The critically-acclaimed disc, with its haunting Appalachian folk and country-blues leanings and tales of 19th-Century treachery, is based on an 1889 flood that wiped out the steeltown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing 2,000.

Not exactly the kind of plaintive self-analysis that dominates acoustic guitar-driven -- a.k.a. folk -- music in the '90s. But then, Oh Susanna exists in an era of her own.

"I'm fascinated by history," says Ungerleider, who's at Lee's Palace tomorrow night opening for Captain Tractor, after six months of touring across Canada and the U.S.

"I love old photographs and stories. But at the same time, you don't want to become a museum curator or something. There's a metaphorical thread and mood to the Johns-town flood that removes it from history: This sense of a rise and fall, hubris, neglect."

She catches herself, laughing: "I do this analysis and I really don't know where it came from."

Ungerleider comes by her interest in "old-tyme Americana" honestly. Born in the U.S. to Jewish-Hungarian-American parents, she moved to Vancouver as a child when her professor dad took a job at the University Of British Columbia.

But there's a personal edge to the harrowing Johnstown that would make it a tough tale to tell night after night.

The cheerful Ungerleider says it's a labour of love. "If you arrange the songs differently," she says, "it's possible that the songs not be so dark."

Not one to listen to her own records -- she just played Johnstown for the first time since putting it out -- she says that her songs take on a new shape on the road.

"Doing a record is wonderful because you're painting a picture. But it's still only the result of several months. Songs exist for five minutes in the air and they evaporate, or they echo in your brain and start to change."

It's Ungerleider's studio impressions that last, though.

She grew up "wanting to be Mick Jagger" before adolescence scared the rock star strut out of her. She tempered her songwriting confidence at Concordia University in Montreal and, returning to West Vancouver after graduation, started gigging as Oh Susanna in 1995.

A seven-song demo tape earned her a league of boosters among Canadian and U.S. rock critics, and was released in 1997 as a self-titled EP on her own Stella label, distributed by Toronto's Outside Music.

Ungerleider picked up a Genie Award earlier this year for her song River Blue, from Amnon Buchbinder's film The Fishing Trip. But if she was carving out her own unique voice, Johnstown was the final cut.

The disc melds electric folk with a creepy, Southern Gothic ambience, crowded with villainous gamblers and sad steeltown ghosts. Its appropriately epic sonic scale was harnessed by noted Toronto producer Peter J. Moore.

Says Ungerleider: "Before we even agreed to work together, Peter said, 'I don't want to make a little folk record.'

"I didn't want it to be quaint, either. I wanted to create a vast landscape for the songs."

Backing Oh Susanna tomorrow are Vancouver's Veal, who will also play their own opening set. Headliners Captain Tractor celebrate the release of their fourth album, Celebrity Traffic Jam, on Canuck indie label Square Dog.