Two decades after her debut, Shemekia Copeland, inspired by the birth of her son, takes a bold step with America’s Child , a collection of songs that confront the realities of life in our country today. These are anthems but not finger-pointers; Copeland makes her stance plain in the opening track, “Ain’t Got Time for Hate” while “The Wrong Idea,” a churning rocker, addresses #MeToo—that “clown at the end of the bar, staring at us a little too hard” will get an earful any second now, you can be sure. And when Copeland makes it known in “Americans” that inclusion does indeed mean everybody, she lays it out so unambiguously that only the most hardheaded hater would find anything to argue about. Copeland is willing to bust out of her comfort zone if that’s what it takes to get the message across, but she never fully leaves the blues behind: The folky ballad “Smoked Ham and Peaches,” featuring album producer Will Kimbrough on National guitar and Rhiannon Giddens on African banjo, smells like country air; “In the Blood of the Blues” manages to deliver a stridence-free history lesson with sweat and fury; and “Great Rain,” co-written by John Prine, is a swampy, dawdling snapshot that gets its guts from the dual guitars of Kimbrough and Al Perkins, and its glory from Copeland and Prine’s vocal sparring. The Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” might seem like an odd choice but it’s a fit, with Copeland bringing a toughness to it that leaves no doubt that she’s not kidding around.