The Road to Rosaryville

Kate Campbell

FOR many years I had wanted to write a song about the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. I had almost quit trying when, as I was writing songs for my fourth album, Rosaryville, I re-read much of Flannery O'Connor's work, including her collected letters, The Habit of Being. There I discovered her lifelong fascination with an often-overlooked verse in the Gospel of St. Matthew: "And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away." The phrase "the violent bear it away" is only found in the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible, which O'Connor would have read as a devout Catholic. She wrote to many priests and read theologians trying to find an interpretation of this scripture, and I followed her search. She discovered several possible readings: violence might mean force used by religious zealots to establish the kingdom of heaven; it might refer to destructive acts by the powers of evil to hinder the kingdom; or more positively, it could describe a self-sacrificing violence or a self-determining violence by which, in spite of all obstacles, the kingdom of heaven will clear a way for itself. Apparently, O'Connor never found any of the interpretations satisfactory, but she used the phrase as a title for one of her novels. The instant I encountered O'Connor's struggle over the phrase, I knew that I had found what I needed to build a song about the 1963 bombing.

I was only two years old when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed, but the incident stuck in my mind and bothered me far more than any of the other violence of that era. Images of the four little girls dressed up for Sunday school appeared everywhere after the bombing—on television, in history books and magazines. The images were familiar; those girls had been doing what I did every week.

Four little girls dressed up nice

Singing 'bout Jesus, red and yellow, black and white

Dreaming of freedom across the land

And all God's children walking hand in hand.

I am the daughter of a Baptist minister, and for me the church was a second home. I knew every nook and cranny and smell of my dad's churches, and I had always thought of church as a safe haven. The violence at Sixteenth Street Baptist brought the civil rights movement close to home.

One deadly blast shattered the peace

Making for a dark Sunday morning on Sixteenth Street

Who can explain such ignorant hate

When the violent bear it away.

I meant the word ignorant as a chastisement of my culture, but also as a kind of personal confession. This had become my standard response to questions about the song, until an interview some months after the release of the album showed me something else. I was explaining the above when I suddenly understood it was not the second verse that was most important to me, but the third:

It hurts my heart to think of them

Four little girls and what they could have been

But we never know about these things

When the violent bear it away.

This verse tries to move beyond blame and guilt, and it acknowledges another way of remembering the four girls: with anguish and lamentation.

Even after the song was completed, its meaning was still developing and changing. Often songs make those leaps before we do. The chorus turns the phrase "the violent bear it away" into a prayerful plea—

Bear it away, bear it away

Merciful Jesus lift up our sorrow

Upon your shoulder

And bear it away

—an image that comes from of my favorite passages of scripture, Isaiah 53:4: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows."

Though it is often concerned with social justice, I think successful songwriting transcends its occasion. I see "The Violent Bear it Away" as both a plea for justice and also an expression of a quieter, more meditative kind of grief.

I've come to approach narrative songwriting almost as I would a short story. I try to tell just enough of the story without telling everything—leaving room for various interpretations and allowing the listeners to fill in the blanks out of their own experience. I have never considered myself a political or social songwriter. I sit down to write about stories that move me; I don't plan to write about civil rights or the rape of the land through strip mining. Before I begin a song, I spend a long time thinking about the story, sometimes many years. I don't play a song in public until I'm sure it's written in the right voice, and consequently I'm not prolific. I don't have a lot of extra songs sitting around.

When I was four years old, my parents gave me a ukulele, and I learned to play folk songs out of a Mel Bay songbook while also learning classical piano and playing in the school band. I began piano lessons when I was seven and took up the clarinet in the fourth grade. All the while, I was surrounded by popular music of the day. Radio stations weren't as compartmentalized then as they are now, and I could hear rock, pop, folk, country, and R&B all on the same station. At twelve, I bought an acoustic guitar and started hanging out with the teenagers at my dad's church, playing the music they played—Dan Fogelberg, John Denver, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan—but my first major musical influence was Dolly Parton, who I saw on the Porter Waggoner Show on TV when I was first starting to play the guitar. Her songs, like "Coat of Many Colors" and "Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man," told stories I could relate to; she wrote them herself, and she had a simple vocal style that I could emulate. As I got a little older, I discovered Emmylou Harris, another major influence.

I got my musical foundation in the Baptist church where my father was a pastor, singing hymns and learning harmonies in the choir. We had a piano and an organ—a Hammond electric, since we couldn't afford a pipe organ. I also get my storytelling bent from my father, who I heard preach week after week. He was more of a storyteller than a hellfire and damnation preacher. He'd been a history major, as I would be later, and he'd use historical anecdotes, Bible stories, humor, and personal family stories. He also used a lot of alliteration and repetition; the way he used sound also led me toward music.

His first church was in Sledge, Mississippi, fifty miles south of Memphis, out in the part of the delta where they grow cotton. Sledge was a town of about 600 people then (it's down to 300 now), and ours wasn't even the First Baptist Church—that's how prevalent the Baptist church is in the rural south. Our church, Hollywood Baptist, stood out across some levees in the cotton fields. Even now, my dad is connected to that church. When I call home, he'll tell me about someone there who recently died.

Throughout my childhood we had Sunday school and church on Sunday morning, Training Union at night, children's choir and Girls in Action on Wednesdays, and a mid-week prayer service. The staff was so small that my dad ran everything, including the youth program and all the mid-week services, and he took care of me since my mom had gone back to school, so the church became my second home.

There was no air conditioning, and often we'd leave the back door open during services. Once during a wedding a dog came in and sat down by the bride. It stayed for the whole thing.

To this day I can walk into any Baptist church and recognize that certain smell and find my way to the library, the choir room or the fellowship hall. I remember the linoleum, the institutional green, my dad's secretary's green metal desk like you'd see at a police station. It was all meant to be very modern and plain. There were no carpets in the sanctuary, no cushions on the pews, just these green, fireproof curtains. One weekday some people went into the sanctuary with ladders and started taking the curtains down, and daddy and the secretary and the janitor just assumed they were taking them to be cleaned, but they were stealing them. A good thing, probably.

The baptistery was painted blue inside like a swimming pool, with a plain cross over it, and a painting of the Jordan River. River images recur in my music, since rivers have recurred in my life. I was born in New Orleans and grew up in Mississippi and Nashville on rivers. I respond to the greenery, the mosquitoes, the swamps. In church, I heard about rivers again and again: the baptism in the Jordan, "On Jordan's stormy banks I stand," the idea of crossing rivers into other lands, rivers as barriers but also things that can move you through barriers or past barriers. My daddy's next church was Two Rivers Baptist in Nashville .

A panel covered the baptistery when it wasn't being used, and you could see sunlight through it. One Sunday in the late sixties, while my dad was preaching, the sun started doing weird things. A deacon in the front row became convinced that someone was in the baptistery, swimming. He got up, went around the back of the church, through the passage, and found a buck-naked teenage girl in there, on LSD. He had to go find a woman to get her out—all while Daddy preached on.

The church janitor, Delmus Jackson, was a great influence on me as a child, and now. I loved his name, and still do. I called him Mr. Delmus, as was appropriate for everyone in the South. He was an elderly African-American man who wore starched overalls and a starched white shirt every day. His wife was a cook, and they went to church down the road at Hopewell Baptist, the black church. I'd follow him around the church as he cleaned, and he'd talk to me. At the top of the stairs we had a picture of Jesus, which, if you looked at it closely, was made up of the whole New Testament written very small in different colors of ink. Delmus Jackson and I would sit under the picture and eat our lunch, and he'd quote scripture to me.

He used a lot of sayings. He'd say, "Preacher, it's not who you know, it's who you know that knows somebody." He also said many times, "I'm serving the Lord. I'm not serving the Two Rivers Baptist Church." What struck me, even at that age, was that here was a man who was serious about his faith and his service, in spite of the difficulties of the cultural environment. He didn't have to speak to me—he could have chosen not to speak to me, or by his demeanor to say, this isn't right, this is why we're having the civil rights movement. But that wasn't his way. He had great dignity, and with him it wasn't about an angle or having to make a point, which he could have done.

As an adult, for years I wanted to write a song about him, and from time to time I'd just write his name down. One day I was sitting at home and I heard that verse from Timothy: "Well done, good and faithful servant." I said it out loud. Then I said his name: "Well done, Delmus Jackson." The poetry of that helped me finally write the song.

I would never have known about the black church in that part of town if not for Delmus Jackson. Hopewell Baptist would invite my father to come and preach for Homecoming Days, and my sister and brother and mom and I would go along. They'd start on Sunday afternoon, and their service was much longer than at a white church. They'd egg the preacher on, saying, "Thank you, preacher!" or "Tell me that again!" and "Amen!" and "Preach!" Then comes the offering, the singing, and then you get to eat. You've never seen so much food. I continue to return to that memory, to the willingness of that black community to welcome us at a time when blacks and whites didn't often get together.

My dad, who was very conservative theologically, was adamant on the question of race relations. The gospel, he said, is that the church is a place for everybody. When the Freedom Rides took place in the summer of 1964, we were still in Sledge. The Freedom Riders started out from Marx, Mississippi, just down County Road 3, and it was very possible that they'd stop at our church on a Sunday morning. Though not everyone agreed, the church decided, should the Freedom Riders appear, to support my dad in allowing them in. They never showed up, but this was a turning point for him. He was taking a risk, with a young family to support. A lot of older preachers lost their jobs over this issue and never preached again, but in that little town people responded to my dad. Later, in Nashville, my dad let the youth do musicals with a drum set, which was considered radical at the time.

Unlike some preachers' kids, I never went through a rebellious stage. Preachers' kids grow up in a fishbowl, where people think it's their obligation to tell your daddy if you were sitting in the back row talking and drawing pictures during the whole service. On the other hand, I didn't always accept everything that my father preached. I read the Bible and decided what I thought; I didn't have to discuss it with my parents. To this day, my parents have a don't ask, don't tell policy about some of my beliefs, and that's fine with everybody. I don't need to know that my father accepts what I think about Catholicism, political issues, or whom I voted for.

Throughout college I continued to play and write songs, but I never thought of being a professional musician until I turned thirty. As an experiment, I decided to focus entirely on music and see what would happen.

I struggled. For a long time only a handful of people were even hearing my songs, and I was living on my credit card. I was giving so much to these songs, and I couldn't see how they'd ever be used, or even heard, much less see where God was in it. Not only that, but I had been forced to drop out of my Ph.D. program in history. The theology I grew up with is Calvinist at root: my parents always made me feel that I could grow up to be whatever I wanted, but it was subtly ingrained that if writing songs and working in the arts was what God wanted, the doors would open and there wouldn't be a struggle to make it in the music business.

Eventually I was offered a publishing deal at Fame Music in Muscle Shoals, Alabama , and a record deal with Compass Records out of Nashville. For about the first three years I couldn't stand the business side of music, and by my mid-thirties I had become very dejected. The entertainment business is about people wanting to control your art, and naturally the artist takes everything personally. She's vulnerable about what she's creating, and she's working with people who say, "Don't worry, we'll take care of everything." But if you want to get your music out there you've got to follow certain rules, which can be very frustrating. Eventually I came to see that I could choose to be involved in the business side, to read the contracts and have appropriate people around me, so that I could free myself and protect my voice—or I could quit right now. I decided I wasn't ready to quit.

Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor are the two prose writers who influence me most. Welty's language is comfort language for me. When I first read her stories I was amazed to find a woman who wrote the way I talked. She was expressing so many of the things I could never say, and doing it in subtle, lyrical language. I respect her because she isn't afraid to talk about the complexity of the South, though she was criticized for it. O'Connor, on the other hand, was more interested in evil and darkness, and uses language that's much tougher and more raw.

Though I'm not Catholic, I've been drawn to the Catholic tradition, I believe because of its contrast with the black-and-white approach of my upbringing. The Baptist church doesn't leave a lot of room for mystery. In the Catholic Church I saw openness to mystery and contemplation that spoke to me because it was so different from what I'd grown up with. That tradition gives you permission to look at beautiful pictures of Mary; it doesn't tell you that doing that means you're praying to Mary and forgetting Jesus. And as a person with a history background, I also love the continuity of tradition: the church calendar, the saints. I still call myself a Baptist, but one who is open to other traditions.

When she heard Rosaryville, what some of my fans call my "Catholic album," Sister Mary Edmond Gibson, who runs Rosaryville Spiritual Life Center in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, said she didn't know how I could have written it, since I'm not Catholic. She said, "That was Mary with you." She's right, I think. It was also the Spirit, and the people who had come into my life at that time.

In another way, the whole of Rosaryville is about feeling distanced from the tradition I grew up in, and it was a spiritual turning point for me. I have felt like a prodigal daughter at times, which is difficult to admit, especially for a Protestant girl in the Southern Baptist subculture whose father is a preacher.

I always send my parents a copy of a new album as soon as I get it, but before they got Rosaryville my mother's younger brother happened to hear me perform some of the songs. He said, "Your parents are going to die when they hear this. They're going to think you've converted to Catholicism." I said, well, so be it, but it turns out that my parents think Rosaryville is my best record, and they don't even see Catholic symbolism, since they're not Catholic. They see the stories: for them, "Heart of Hearts" is a song about odd things that go on in the South. "Porcelain Blue" is just about New Orleans. My mom thinks "Look Away" is the best song I've ever written.

Rosaryville was about exploring and inhabiting a culture outside my own. Only after that could I go back and make Wandering Strange, a gospel album, which reconnects with my Baptist roots, not only musically, but also with the culture the hymns come out of. The water images of my childhood are everywhere in that album: "On Jordan 's Stormy Banks" and "There is a Fountain" and "Come Thou Fount of Ev'ry Blessing."

My family was in the car in the K-Mart parking lot in Nashville when the news came over the radio that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot in Memphis. The local news program was advising everyone to go home, since Memphis wasn't far away and there might be riots. I was seven, and this was my first awareness that what was happening in the South between blacks and whites was happening where I lived. I hadn't thought of myself as a Southerner until that day.

It wasn't until I began to see the civil rights movement on television, and as my family began to travel more, that I understood how people who lived outside the South perceived the South.

In the mid-seventies, the Nashville school system began forced integration by busing. Members of our own church were starting private Christian schools so that their children wouldn't have to go to school with black kids, and at the end of the summer, my father sat me down on the bed and said, "School starts in a couple of weeks, and you're going to get on the bus and go to the inner city, and it's going to be a great year for you." And it was, though my father took flack for this. He got a lot of mail.

I played basketball that year, and one weekend I invited a friend from the team to come stay with us, and her parents agreed to let her go out to the suburbs. We ate tacos and went to church on Sunday, and my father received some vague threats about having the house burned down, though nothing happened.

In my writing and music I keep trying to understand the culture I grew up in. I want to be clear about this: I do see my upbringing as positive, and in many ways unlike blanket stereotypes about the South. At church I was around people who I would never have met otherwise, of all different economic groups and ages, young people who went off to Vietnam and never came back. We put on youth musicals that used the "peace, love, and joy" language of the hippie movement. I saw all this from a child's point of view, but as I got older and understood more of what was going on around me I developed a kind of a love-hate relationship with my culture. I don't want to lose the good parts, but at the same time I didn't and don't want to accept that everything had to be the way it was.

The song "Look Away" on Rosaryville, which my mother likes so much, is about trying to understand how goodness was also present in the South, misguided and unjust though it often was. I once saw Eudora Welty interviewed in front of a burned-down, overgrown mansion in Windsor , Mississippi—all that was left standing were the classical columns. She described the mentality of the old South, the great civilization the plantation owners envisioned. They built their mansions with Greek and Roman columns, she said, because they admired the ancient civilizations; they valued education, even for girls; they valued classical literature and architectural beauty. Welty said, "I have to believe that it wasn't all bad." I'd never heard a Southerner verbalize that before, and "Look Away" came out of hearing it.

Never saw a cross of fire; never saw an angry mob.

I saw sweet magnolia blossoms. I chased lightning bugs at night.

Never dreaming others saw our way of life in black and white....

Part of me hears voices crying. Part of me can feel their weight.

Part of me believes that mansion stood for something more than hate.

As much as I change, I will never not be Southern; I'll always be the daughter of a Baptist preacher. The people who inhabit my music—Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, Delmus Jackson and the folk sculptor William Edmondson, my father and mother, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, the members of the Hollywood and Two Rivers Baptist Churches, the sisters at the Rosaryville Center, the sisters at Sacred Heart in Cullman, Alabama—are all part of the South. The South has a brutal history, and I've seen the legacy of its violence at close hand, but instead of turning away, those experiences make me want to look more closely at all the richness, tragedy, complexity of what I've inherited.

Visit Kate Campbell as Image Artist of the Month for May '04

Issue #36•Fall 2002