Kate will open our Annual Fall Conference tonight with a concert at the church beginning at 7:00pm.

When entering into a Kate Campbell album for the first time, one should know that it’s not simply a collection of recently written songs, but a deep, connected vision that has been forming in Kate’s mind for a few years. In keeping with her recent focus on her musical roots with 2000’s Wandering Strange and the country music of her childhood with 2003’s Twang on a Wire, Blues and Lamentations finds Kate digging deeper into a musical style and emotion that has provided the understory for her music from the beginning - - the blues.

“I love the concept of understory,” Kate says, “because I feel like the blues is really underneath it all…where I come from, being born in New Orleans, living in the Mississippi Delta, and then most of my life living here in what we call the Mid–South in Tennessee…it’s this direct line. If you listen to my music you’re going to hear New Orleans all the way to South Central Kentucky. And you get Northern Mississippi. You get Muscle Shoals and you get Memphis in there, so it’s kind of like my musical heritage.”

Blues and Lamentations begins with a musical journey of sorts in “Miles of Blues,” revealing that the emotional state of the blues is tied to no particular geographical location. Though the blues have mostly been associated with certain cities such as Chicago or New Orleans, Kate insists that the feeling itself is universal.

“The blues are a feeling,” Kate explains. “You just can’t get around it…Sometimes it’s a very bad feeling, but overall, I think music itself is a way to release those.”

Using strictly acoustic instrumentation and one-take performances throughout, Blues and Lamentations has an organic, earthy feel which ties the lyrics ever more closely to the earth itself. A powerful force in Kate’s writing, the land plays a role in nearly every song on Blues and Lamentations. “Free World” gives voice to a person’s desire to freely live off the land while “Shallow Grave” tells the story of a woman vowing to haunt the former lover who left her to die an emotional death just below the surface. The latter tune may be one of the darkest songs Kate has ever sung, but she feels it captures an honest emotion that isn’t often heard in modern music.

“‘Shallow Grave’ is a very dramatic way of talking about this,” Kate admits, “But I think this is what people feel sometimes when they’re cast aside.”

Another song on the album, “Wheels Within Wheels,” showcases Kate’s knack for telling the stories of highly interesting, offbeat characters. The song tells the true story of a Texas preacher named Burrell Cannon who nearly beat the Wright Brothers in developing the airplane. After a fan of Kate’s told her about Cannon, her writer’s eye immediately kicked in.

In fact, Kate’s unique vision for writing has earned her more comparisons to authors than to fellow musicians. Entertainment Weekly referred to her as a “musical Eudora Welty” while NPR’s Morning Edition included Kate among modern southern authors in their series “Artists of the New South.” Kate’s highly literate songwriting has also attracted some of the top musicians recording today to contribute to her albums, and Blues and Lamentations is no exception. Guy Clark joins Kate on “Pans of Biscuits” – a traditional song Guy first played for her many years ago.

Appropriately, Kate invited Maura O’Connell to lend her heavenly harmony vocals to Blues and Lamentations’ closing track, “Peace Comes Stealing Slow.” Partly inspired by a William Butler Yeats poem, the song ends the album on a prayerful note. In essence, this prayer captures the renewing effects of the blues - - ultimately connecting people together in their humanity.

Kate explains further, “With this record I hope people will listen to it a few times and enjoy it, and they can sing along with it…but the more they listen they’re going to hear the undercurrents that are going on…then they’re going to maybe start thinking of the lyrics differently… It’s about tying us into humanity, and that’s what music and art does anyway. It’s all there.”

--Hunter Kelly, June 2005
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