Most Yankees nurse a cluelessness about the South that begins with not knowing about chess pie and dead-ends with a fear of meeting someone still forcing fervent conversation about “the war of northern aggression.” I’m a Yankee. Same fears, but grateful for a few friends who believe that if undertaken in the right spirit, the education of the northern peoples is a worthy, and possibly rewarding, task. Our cold Yankee ways, our sharp accents, our inability to do upkeep on basic amiable conversations or have anything close to politeness might be corrected, if they could just get someone like me south of the Mason-Dixon line.
My educational opportunity came when Kate Campbell invited me to be a roadie for a week on her Blues and Lamentations cd tour in the Deep South. Along the way we stopped off to stay with other tutors, Rebecca and Mark Wiggs in Jackson, Mississippi. Certain foods & hooch, I was instructed, are fundamental to a Southern education—hence a lesson on Junior League cookbooks and the making of mint juleps. (You haven’t really lived until you’ve eaten a full plate of skillet-fried catfish and fried dill pickles. Or biscuits and gravy, fried okra, and a crawfish quesadilla.) Mark also had wisdom to impart about roots music and the boundaries of the Delta: “According to one southern writer,” Mark said, “the Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, Mississippi.”
Maybe it was a crash course in music, in Southern food, in culture, in landscape. But our most important conversations seemed to take place either in the car on a long stretch of road, or at places like Hal and Mal’s or The Mayflower or the Loveless Café, places that northerners call diners and southerners call meat and threes (places that sell meat entrées along with three side dishes).
If a cd is like a roadtrip and the tracks are like stopping points along the road, then Kate Campbell is driving the car, and we’re all doing the 13-county tour, from Nashville, down to Cullman, Birmingham, Meridian, Jackson, Sledge, Oxford, onto the Natchez Trace, Witchdance, Tupelo, and back to Nashville.
The first thing you notice on the roadtrip is that the opening cut, “Miles of Blues,” has a striking universality: everyone’s invited to pile into the car and drive down the roads, South and North, that seem to narrate the story of the blues the farther you drive. They record, too, the antidote, “There’s nothing like a guitar / crying in the night / when you got blues / miles and miles of blues.” And by the end of the first tune, you have started your tour of the New South.
The “New South” is both a label and a place that Campbell explores incessantly. We’re likely to associate it with the post-World War II, post-Civil Rights movement era, but Henry Grady—editor and publisher of an Atlanta newspaper after the Civil War—was the first to use the term, commenting that his city was the entranceway for the New South. Campbell sees the New South as still in progress: named and located but changing. It’s an elusive notion that has inspired folk artists and visionaries like the sculptor William Edmondson and the Reverend Burrell Cannon, who saw a dream of Ezekiel’s “wheels within wheels” (cue track 7 of Blues and Lamentations) and in 1902 he decided to build the Ezekiel Airship, a flying machine weighing about a ton, and take it to the St. Louis Fair, where en route the airship fell off the train, the machinery shattered, and the vision was temporarily lost. Something in the stubborn intensity of such outsider artists catches Campbell’s own imagination, where failed projects speak to hope, and to spiritual truth.
A few cuts later, and further down the road, you begin to notice the billboards along the way, where religious slogans stand in place of sermons. If your car makes it down I-59 past L.A. (that’s Lower Alabama, for us Yankees) and on toward New Orleans, you’ll encounter this billboard sign: Jesus is Lord of Picayune and Mississippi Welcomes You. By now we’re in the deep South, well into the tune “Genesis Blues,” where Campbell sings, “We all know that Eden / is down in the Delta south of Memphis” (between Yazoo City and Tchula, to be precise, population 126). There’s something quirky here, mixing with the familiar in the music, in the landscape, in the billboards, and with a deep internal tug for those who both laugh at the signs and ponder them. And by the time we’re into the next track, we’re coming to recognize the shape of Campbell’s genius: she’s looking at an exterior landscape and speaking to an interior one.
Put on any Kate Campbell cd while you are driving or go to catch her at a live radio show or folk club, and you’ll hear mention of her oft-returned-to places: the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, for instance, where Brother Joseph built Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the California Missions, and (my favorite) the Temple of the Fairies, in “perfect miniature,” using broken tiles, Pond’s cold cream jars, marbles, sea shells, and a serious amount of cement. Selma and Birmingham, too, where the struggle for racial equality and for a voice echo loudly through each new decade.
And in each album you’ll hear references to writers like Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. In Jackson, Mark Wiggs takes us to “Miss Welty’s” house. Even though it’s closed for reconstruction preparatory to opening for tours, we are magically given entrance to see the camellias, the trellises, the windows, pane after pane of light sipped into the windows and little signs along the way containing quotes from Welty’s writings: “An editor a long time ago told me, ‘Don’t ever have the moon in the wrong part of the sky.’ And that’s important.” As Kate Campbell looks at the sign, she says to me, “Now that line’s going to be a song sometime, it’s just not coming right now.” Whether in two years or ten, it will find a way to an album. And I understand that Miss Welty’s is one of the voices in Campbell’s own music.
Our literary pilgrimage continues in Oxford, Mississippi, where we visit Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. The evening before, Campbell sings track number 6 at the live broadcast of Thacker Mountain Radio: “Free World,” taken from Faulkner’s writings, which Campbell decided to read one summer—the Entire Corpus of his work. At Rowan Oak, you can see where Faulkner plotted out A Fable in columns on his writing-room wall using graphite and red grease pencils, sorting through Holy Week one day at a time. You’ll hear the sound of Campbell’s album in the background: “I’m going out into the free world and farm / I’m gonna paint me a big red barn / don’t wanna do nobody else no harm / I’m going out,” a deceptively simple way to start off a narrative that is representative of something much larger than itself.
After one week of being a roadie, I know a few things. I know how to find my way to good fried pie, catfish filets, pulled pork, and fried okra (Top Hat Barbecue). I know how to sell a few cds. I’ve learned how to put that big old folk acoustic guitar carefully back into the gig bag. How to coil the lone guitar cord and pack it in with the picks and capo. I’ve learned that sound checks are boring.
I’ve learned that Kate always speaks in each show (and each album) to faith, that she speaks to visionary art, to a sense of place, and that she looks into the eyes of prejudice and always says its name. Aloud. And you feel like she’s talking right at you. And you do two important things: you get uncomfortable, and you listen. And maybe you will do a third, and that is make a change. Recently Campbell was asked to record a song for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. If on your own road trip you stop there, you’ll hear her at the end of the memorial’s video tape, speaking the names of those who died at the hand of prejudice during the Civil Rights movement, among them Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr.
At some point I started wondering where Campbell’s songs were ending and the road was beginning, or where a place grew into a song, or a line from a southern writer mixed with an idiom of southern music and found something akin to a Delta sound. Or how history and story mix into that music that is Campbell’s own.
If you like roots music, you’ll be a goner for Campbell’s album. It’s completely informed by roots—Delta, Dixie, jazz, country—informed, but never quite overwritten by those genres. She has too healthy a respect for form to imitate musical monuments. What she does is keep a sort of folk sound in full southern accents, tantalizingly reminiscent of blues and jazz and bluegrass, blended in fresh concoctions: strains of all of them are the pulse of this album. “My whole life,” Campbell tells me while we’re driving toward Cullman, “has been in the parts of the South where American music came from, starting in New Orleans.” Southern music, she insists, “is actually American Music,” and vice versa.
Into the Delta and along Highway 61, the Blues Highway, you can hear the informing strains of some of best of the blues, on down to the sounds of New Orleans. Then along the Natchez Trace, in the Mississippi clay hills east of the Delta you find yourself in a city that is best pronounced by the lips of southerners—Tupelo—the birthplace of Elvis on Old Saltillo Road, where the beginning of the most exciting mix of gospel and blues/soul to come from America started with a little guitar and the first lines to “Old Shep” sung at a county fair. Elvis is another informing voice for Campbell’s album, where in cut 13, “Peace Comes Stealing Slow,” you feel she’s singing of one particular story but also addressing every other story she’s ever sung, ending with a prayer for peace, which is the prayer anyone who visits Saltillo Road prays, in the confusion of this new kind of music—whether in civil wars or civil demonstrations, soldiers in conflict, or a king in confusion, all praying for peace, for a place to stand.
But it’s past time for another mint julep. And I’ve been informed by one southerner who moved North that going to Miss Welty’s you must pick up Old Weller’s Antique 107, which is the meanest, smoothest, hardest sour mash I’ve met to date. While Rebecca pours, Mark traces nascar’s roots, all the way back to fast driving in the hills, cars loaded with moonshine racing to beat the police out of a dry county. And I have a newfound interest in nascar.
The tour takes the last two days to follow the Natchez Trace—quiet early winter hills—where there are markers for everything but traces of nothing. And the tour book tells us that stopping at the sights is a practice in imagination, since no house or object remains left to view. Still, I feel up to the challenge.
We follow the Trace up to Nashville, where it ends rights at the place where more good food and bright lights meet, the Loveless Café. Then a tour of Nashville’s Music Row, the Muses, the Pancake Pantry in the Hip Zip, and then to Cheekwood, to see the art of William Edmondson, whose sculptures are featured on Campbell’s Monuments album. The sculptures are not complex, but never simple either. They form a kind of refuge in something alive and uncluttered—the revealed form.
Back again to the Loveless, we meet a pan of biscuits and red-eye gravy, made with coffee to cut the salt inhabiting each bite of country ham. And Campbell’s remake cut “Pans of Biscuits” presides over this last leg of the trip, closing the tour with a lesson in music history, as Campbell talks about this early 1900s Kentucky sharecropper tune, a song with as many versions as there are recordings of it, including Bob Dylan’s.
I’m not trying to convince you to become southern or anything. I just think you should take the tour. If you don’t have the Loveless Café nearby and can’t get a gig as a roadie, if you don’t find cheese grits greeting you in the morning and fried okra at noon, then do your tour the other way. The Blues and Lamentations tour. Go out to your car. Start driving on a promisingly long road. Pop the cd in or play it from your iPod hooked into your stereo system. Keep driving. Keep listening. Feel the way the wheels turn on the open road. And get acquainted with the music of Kate Campbell. Discover the well-traveled roads of the New South.
Lil Copan is senior editor with Paraclete Press. She lives and writes in Boston.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
