Have guitar, will travel

Each year before Labor Day and Memorial Day, the anticipation builds. When the long weekends finally roll around, guitars are stowed in car trunks, wedged into bus seats, and carried onto airplanes. The folk artists are coming home.

Or, at least for many, what feels like home. The biannual Cutting Edge of the Campfire festival at Club Passim in Cam-

bridge has vaulted more than a few musicians into the limelight (Kris Delmhorst, Deb Talan, and Erin McKeown for example). More than that, though, it is an excuse for the folk world to come together. "I found a community through the festival," says Meg Hutchinson, 26, a songwriter who performs tonight at 7. Musicians return again and again; this is Hutchinson's sixth time playing the event, or maybe her eighth, no one can remember for sure.

This year, Campfire has a four-day roster of more than 100 performers. Some are well known, some are just starting out, and some fall somewhere in between: promising young artists beginning to generate a buzz. Here are three to watch.

MEG HUTCHINSON: A VOICE OF HER OWN

Hutchinson has come a long way since her first gig in a dive bar. "I would stand in a dark corner singing little folk songs, and people would be throwing darts," she says. "The more they drank, the more the darts would go in the wrong direction." In addition to a new album, "The Crossing," released in June, she has won awards at several folk festivals. She was recently chosen for the Reach 2004 Emerging Artists Tour and will make an appearance on the main stage at next year's Falcon Ridge Folk Festival after winning a showcase there this year.

Originally from South Egremont, she relocated to Boston two years ago. The move from country to city has become a major theme in the music she describes as "lyric-based contemporary folk."

Language is as important to her songwriting as music is. Hutchinson's parents are English teachers and writers, and she has a bachelor's degree in creative writing. "I grew up loving words, feeling like they mattered and that there was a new way to say something," she says.

Hutchinson has been compared to artists from Tracy Chapman to Ani DiFranco, but her sunny, raw-silk voice is all her own. "There's no fog on the glass when you hear Meg," says Crit Harmon, the producer of "The Crossing," who has worked with artists including Martin Sexton, Susan Werner, and Lori McKenna. "You're not hearing a derivative of other artists, you're hearing something very pure that's very much Meg.

"She has that thing that better artists have," he adds. "From the beginning of a song to the end, she's in a zone, she's in a mood, and everybody gets it. You can just see her settle in and create magic till the end of the song."

Hutchinson always wanted to be a songwriter, even as a child. "It's a way to make sense of my life," she says. "I do it because it brings me joy."

Chris O'Brien: A life in folk

O'Brien, 24, who performs tomorrow night at 8:15, also had youthful folk aspirations. He grew up in Amherst listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell; his stepmother is a folk DJ and used to manage the Iron Horse in Northampton. (She and Dar Williams were roommates for several years.) At 5 or 6, he says, he would hang out at the club, listening and taking in the scene. His uncle gave him his first guitar when he was 12, and it's the one he still plays today.

"When you grow up idolizing James Taylor and Bob Dylan, the moment you get your hands on a guitar, you start writing," he says.

The songs he writes brim with sincerity, taking on topics from relationships to cross-country travel. "The goal is not only to talk about what inspires you but to talk about what is true about humans in general," he says.

O'Brien's sound veers toward the folk end of the folk-pop spectrum. He doesn't just listen to Dylan, Sexton, and Patty Griffin, he studies them, then tries to incorporate what he learns into his music.

"He's got a great voice," says Club Passim manager Matt Smith, "a really strong voice." And, he adds, "he's a solid guitar player: It's not just `strum strum strum.' "

Like Hutchinson, O'Brien is a Campfire veteran. This will be his sixth appearance. His first gig was a Campfire performance, in May 2002. "It's a special thing for me because of that," he says.

O'Brien has recorded a self-titled, six-song EP. He performs frequently in New York and around Massachusetts and is leaving his computer job in October to play music full time. "I'm looking forward to it, and I'm scared to death," he says. "I gotta do it."

Liz Carlisle: A little bit country, a little bit Ivy League
Carlisle is from Missoula, Mont., and performs in a cowboy hat. She's also a Harvard junior studying ethnomusicology who writes a weekly folk column for the Harvard Independent and plans to write her thesis on folk music.

Carlisle, 20, who plays Sunday at noon, didn't set out on a folk path. Though she grew up singing with her father, she was, she says, "a gung-ho jazz drummer" and expected that to be her focus.

"When I left home and started to become my own person," she says, "I found writing was a real central part of my life. And I got sick of hauling drums around."

Which is how she came to play her country-tinged folk. Many of her songs deal with coming of age and have a strong sense of place. She released a CD, "Half & Half," in May.

This is Carlisle's first Campfire performance. Getting to know her fellow musicians "has been like an old-fashioned apprenticeship in the folk world," she says.

"I pretty much showed up in Boston with just my voice, the rugged individualism that emanated from the Montana landscape where I spent my first 18 years, and a dream. I didn't know a soul, but I already feel as at home at Club Passim as anywhere."

At Harvard, she's worked with Livingston Taylor, an artist in residence there. "She writes a really nice lyric and writes a great chorus," Taylor says. "Clearly, she enjoys the process. She represents somebody who's really committed to improving her craft. That's always fun to see."

Carlisle may continue on to graduate school or go into teaching, but whatever else happens, she sees herself performing for a long time. "I want to be singing when I'm 80," she says.

The Cutting Edge of the Campfire festival runs today through Monday at Club Passim, Cambridge. $12 per day; $20 for a weekend pass; 617-492-7679; for schedule times, go to www.clubpassim.org/campfire.