NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — Don't look for her songs on the standard country, rock, or even Christian charts. Instead, Kate Campbell's fans would say, listen to the singer-songwriter's music for the unique voice it gives not only to the experiences of everyday life but to the concerns of Christians engaged in the struggle for a better world.
The Nashville-based artist recently released her 10th album, Blues and Lamentations. Campbell gave the CD a double launch — first, a night-time gig at a well-known club, then, about a week later, a Saturday morning brunch at Nashville's progressive Glendale Baptist Church. Campbell is currently on national tour for the album, her itinerary including churches, colleges, music festivals, even the spring gathering of the Arkansas Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Tough to pigeonhole, Campbell's music combines various styles, including country, folk, and blues. Key to her songwriting is storytelling, putting words to music not just to rehash the latest country and pop themes but to imprint events and characters from the past and present onto her listeners' minds.
Campbell's love for telling stories in song connects with another of her longtime interests — history. After studying history as an undergraduate student as well as at the masters and doctoral levels, Campbell eventually learned to combine her academic and artistic passions.
“I kind of feel like . . . that's what I am — I'm a historian,” Campbell said. But rather than the scholarly papers and books in which many historians write about the past and its lessons, she discovered that music was the best vehicle for her to express the insights history taught her. Linking music and history proved a turning point. That was “when I felt that I was finding my own voice and actually when people began to listen,” she explained.
A classic example of Campbell's musical storytelling is “Wheels Within Wheels,” from her latest release. Echoing the biblical book of Ezekiel, the song is about a Texas preacher in the early 1900s who almost beat the Wright Brothers to inventing the airplane.
The song relates the tale of the Rev. Burrell Cannon, whose “Ezekiel Airship” was destroyed when wind blew the aircraft off a train taking it to a St. Louis fair.
In Campbell's song, the minister gets his inspiration for the plane from the Old Testament prophet. “Ezekiel saw wheels within wheels, and Burrell seen them too,” Campbell sings. While the preacher believed the Bible revealed to him the initial design, the song relates, he eventually concluded that God never intended human beings to fly.
“A person doesn't just hear Kate's music,” said Frenchie Fortenberry, a member of Glendale Baptist. Rather, Fortenberry explained, “you see what she is singing about … because of the vivid descriptions of the characters and scenes portrayed in the lyrics.”
Campbell sings about “ordinary people who sometimes, in their unusual pursuits, do things that become extraordinary,” Fortenberry added.
Other songs by Campbell on both the new release and earlier albums reflect another interest — social justice. And behind the songs about this theme lurks the same awareness of the past and what it means for the present.
“Freedom Song” on the latest CD weaves words from Martin Luther King, Jr. with a reference to Harriet Taubman and the Underground Railroad. In “Lord, Help the Poor and Needy,” the singer asks God to remember people in pain because of their own choices or the situation life presents them. And “Peace Comes Stealing Slow” turns a phrase from Irish poet W. B. Yeats into a prayer for peace.
Born in New Orleans but growing up in the Mississippi Delta and then Nashville, Campbell remembers writing a song when she was 6 or 7 about a man eating out of a trash can. Her songs grow out of what she sees, hears and feels.
“Religion interests me. Race interests me. And economics. Poverty,” Campbell explained. “Those things do interest me personally, and they move me personally,” she added. And what stirs her expresses itself musically in varied forms. “Sometimes it's humorous songs, and sometimes serious,” Campbell said. “It can come out different ways.”
Daughter of retired Orlando pastor Jim Henry, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Campbell looks to her family and her religious past with gratitude for what she learned about how to treat other people.
“Growing up a preacher's kid … was a very positive experience for me,” said Campbell, who remains a part of Baptist life. “My father always believed that people were important first,” she explained. “People are most important to God,” she added. “Other things we're all going to disagree on.”
Campbell “grew up with models of faith who taught her that following Jesus means caring about what's going on in the world,” said April Baker, co-pastor of Glendale Baptist, where the singer debuted her CD. “You can't listen to her music without hearing the roots of her faith in it,” Baker added.
“Kate is doing her work that's hers to do. She's doing it in ways that are genuine and authentic to who she is and where she came from and the theology that she embraces,” Baker observed. “She's a voice that calls .. with an authenticity to church-folk and non-church-folk alike.”
–Photos available from Associated Baptist Press.