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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.
by Kate Campbell Large River Music, 2006 $16.98 |
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.
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