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The 1990 Newport Folk Festival finished up last night with a horn-filled, R&B tune, “What Is Hip?” from Tower of Power, who accompanied closing act Michelle Shocked.

Well, it was hip. And it got everyone dancing. But it sure left open the question “What is folk?”

It’s obvious that it ain’t just acoustic guitars anymore. If Saturday’s part of the festival, which closed with Joan Baez, would have sounded at least vaguely familiar to a festivalgoer of, say, 1962, yesterday’s show demonstrated how far the boundaries have stretched.

“It all fits,” said festival director Robert Jones, as Shocked left the stage – and that, apparently, is the lesson of a modern folk festival.

Attendance yesterday was about 5,500, bringing the two-day total to 13,000. Of the two days, I’d give the musical nod to yesterday, thanks to superb performances from Richard Thompson, The Roches, Ry Cooder, and Shocked.

Shocked’s set encompassed both old and new. She began as a solo, with acoustic guitar, performing with great intensity and humor, making no secret of her unabashedly radical politics.

She sang about her childhood in East Texas, did a pair of songs she learned from her father, then sang a powerful “Ain’t No Justice,” [sic] about a subway graffiti writer [sic] in New York City, strangled in police custody.

Shocked’s bitter, passionate indictment of injustice cut through the hazy afternoon air. She sang a Steve Goodman song, a cappella, about a girl widowed by Vietnam, and even had the crowd conduct a “die-in” (everyone falls down) as a barbed comment on Rhode Island’s celebration of V-J Day.

Shocked shifted gears with the arrival of Tower of Power, with its superb 5-piece horn section. With TOP, Shocked moved into material from her last LP, Captain Swing.>

Shock swayed and danced across the stage with Tower Singer Tom Bowes, obviously having a high old time on tunes like “Too Little Too Late” and “(Don’t You Mess Around With) My Little Sister.” During “Barefootin” Shocked waved her socks over her head.

She appeared equally at home in both modes, and equally delightful. But her set lost much of its intimacy and political thrust when the band appeared. Her solo work was truer to folk festival tradition, and the most upfront political performance of either day.

Fans who caught guitarist Ry Cooder’s amazing performance at last year’s festival were eagerly awaiting his return, this time with fellow slide guitar master, David Lindley.

Cooder’s set fell slightly short of the chills-up-the-spine appearance last year, but only slightly.

Cooder and Lindley, eventually joined by Cooder’s son on percussion, sampled a vast repertoire of American music that ran from the gospel of “Jesus on the Main Line” to a rockin’ “Wooly Bully” to folk standard “Goodnight, Irene.”

Choosing from a zoo of odd stringed instruments, Cooder and Lindley sent the festival into slide guitar heaven. Cooder did a long, superb solo on bottleneck slide guitar to lead into an ominous performance of Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man,” while Lindley ran a bow across an electric guitar for an eerie low moan.

Cooder’s talents as an instrumentalist and musicologist are well known, but he is also a fine, gutsy singer. He jokingly referred to “Wooly Bully” as “a great American folk song” before he and Lindley played a version that had the crowd on its feet and the boats out in the harbor honking their horns.

Accordionist Flaco Jimenez joined Cooder and Lindley for their “Goodnight, Irene” finale. Jimenez, who plays conjunto (or Tex-Mex) music, played his own vibrant set that included conjunto versions of country songs, among them “Dwight Yoakam’s “Streets of Bakersfield.”

Both The Roches and Richard Thompson were predictably brilliant. It gets boring to write about how fine they are; it’s never boring to hear them.

The Roches – Maggie, Terre and Suzzy – lend credence to the theory that siblings have an edge when it comes to singing harmonies. They opened with the perfect harmonies of “Summertime;” on “Big Nothing” their voices wound intricate countermelodies around each other. And hearing The Roches rapid-fire version of “The Hallelujah Chorus” never fails to amaze.

Richard Thompson showed just how good one man with a guitar can be. The man has a wealth of gifts – he is an intense, emotional singer, a fine songwriter, and a brilliant guitarist, whether he plays acoustic or electric. Why he’s not a huge star is a mystery to me.