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The
following article appears in the Sept.-Nov. '98 issue of FolkNotes.
Kate
Campbell: Plenty of Vision
By
Peter Saulson
The
first time I heard Kate Campbell was in an interview on
WUMB (Folk Radio 91.9, Boston). The talk was interesting,
but when she sang I said "Well, she's no Emmylou
Harris." (Of course no one is.) Three years later I
discovered her new CD in a local bookstore. When the
title cut, "Visions of Plenty," came on, I w as blown away by the
polished, confident sound and the moving, profound
lyrics. Behind that same idiosyncratic voice from the
South, was another, more familiar sound. Yes, Emmylou
thinks Kate Campbell is worth our attention. She's right.
These songs are both beautiful and deceptively simple.
Most tell a story like something a friend might relate
over a leisurely meal--if that friend had endless
sympathy and knew firsthand some southern Gothic
characters. Indeed, Kate Campbell's stories come from a
heart shaped by life spent in the South. She tells the
story of America over the past thirty-odd years. Her most
historically-situated songs relive moments of the Civil
Rights movement as seen through the eyes of a child.
("Crazy in Alabama", the other song on Visions
of Plenty on which Emmylou Harris sings, is one example.)
Listening to her three CD's (Songs from the Levee and
Moonpie Dreams are her first two) taught me something I
ought to have known, that the story of post-war America
is the story of our attempt to build some sort of racial
justice. Everything else (the Vietnam War, Watergate, and
all that followed) was a sideshow.
This message comes without a trace of preachiness. And
she does it without that staple of popular music, the
love song. At her fine August 2 show at Happy Endings,
she introduced her song "A Perfect World" as
"the closest I've come to writing a love song;"
it is in fact a beautiful evocation of love as a way of
drawing strength to face the travails of the world. The
love is there throughout, of course: a love of humanity
nurtured as the daughter and wife of preachers. (Her
husband, Ira Campbell, is listed as a co-writer on many
of her songs.) It is expressed with an apparently
effortless artistry that should earn Kate Campbell a
steadily growing crowd of appreciative fans.
This page
maintained by Dana Cooke. E-mail me at djcooke@aiusa.com.
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