Travel Music

Destination: American South

Albums: Camilla, Wellspring, Twilight by Caroline Herring

BY KERRY DEXTER

Caroline Herring knows the American South, its heart and soul, its history and landscapes. The stories which rise from this deep knowledge of her native ground are what she draws on the create her music.

The name of her album Camilla is  also the name of a small town in Georgia. It is a town where, during the civil rights days of  the early 1960s, a woman went to see a friend in jail. There is a story that flows from that action, a story of courage and fear and loss and strength, which Herring tells with poetic economy in the song from which she takes the album’s title.

The dark and light of the American South, both history and present day, are what Herring most often turns to in her songs. On the album Camilla, there’s another piece having to do with the the civil rights times, a song called White Dress. Mae Frances Moultrie, the only African American woman on the first Freedom Ride in 1961, was wearing a white dress the day her bus was firebombed  as they rode through Alabama. Grounded in vivid detail, Herring’s treatment  is neither a polemic nor a recounting of fact, but rather a story of connection and disconnection and the many faces courage may take.

“I could write about heroes of the civil rights era all day,” Herring says.“They each deserve a song.”

She does, however, write about other things — lots of other things. Summer Song entwines the experience of grief with the heart of nature, framed in references which will resonate with anyone familiar with southern landscapes. Traveling Shoes is a story about journeys of several sorts, inspired by a story by Eudora Welty. Fireflies  “is about a little girl chasing fireflies,” Herring says.

These threads of landscape, history, family, and vivid emotion told with understated grace have long run through Herring’s writing. On her first album, Twilight, celebrating the wisdom and feeling the pain of the south’s divided history underlie two very different songs, Wise Woman and Standing in the Water.

Carolina Moon is a bluegrass-tinged love song with a decidedly southern flavor, while Delta Highway frames thinking about change in the landscape of a drive on a stormy night.

On her album Wellspring, Herring turns to history for the story in Mistress, which is drawn from the life of an African American woman who lived as the honored wife of plantation owner, and how her life changed. Colorado Woman, also on Wellspring, is the feisty story of a pioneer. Trace explores the many layers of history along the Natchez Trace, and Magnolias is a gentle story of growing love.

Twining the threads of love, history, hope, and family,I’ll bring you back again to Camilla. One of the songs on that album came from Herring’s experience when she and her young daughter set out to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama. Things did not quite go as they had planned. Still, images of history and present day and the connections of all that to being a parent fill the song.

In the chorus, Herring sings,

“Honey, it goes like this: you take  your hand,

you lift  it up, you put it on your heart,

and there you stand— singing — ‘This land is your land, this land is my land…‘”

Will Caroline Herring’s  music  make you want to take a road trip to the American South? Perhaps. Whether you travel southern roads in real time or in imagination, Caroline Herring’s music will add dimension to how you think about this land of light and shadow.

Books About the South

As A Traveler’s Library is a place for readers,  I thought you might also like to know that Herring first encountered the story that led to the song Camilla while she was reading Taylor Branch’s history of the civil rights years, Parting the Waters.  Herring’s husband, Joseph Crespino, is himself a scholar of the American South and an award winning author whose books include Strom Thurmond’s America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.

Children’s Albums

When she’s not looking into stories drawn from the history and culture of the south, Herring has been working on songs inspired by children’s books. She has recorded one album from this, The Little House Songs, and at this writing is working on plans for two others, also with book connections. This is  a different sort of venture from her other recordings as she is funding these herself and  through Kickstarter. You can learn more about the children’s music project and  help by following this link to Kickstarter.

Note: It is the policy of A Traveler’s Library to reveal affiliate relationships. Album cover images, titles, and book titles here are links to Amazon, where you can listen to partial music tracks and shop for albums and books. If you click on the link and make a purchase at Amazon, it will benefit Music Road, for which we thank you. Video is from YouTube.com