BIOGRAPHY
Caroline Herring is an American singer/songwriter who inspires audiences through her songs about injustice, hope and perseverance. Herring started her career in Austin TX when she won Best New Artist at the SXSW Austin Music Awards. Since that time, she has recorded eight albums and has toured throughout the United States and Europe for almost 20 years.
Herring has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition, BBC 4’s Front Row and A Prairie Home Companion. Her albums have won numerous awards, including:
Songlines Top 10 International Albums of the Year (Camilla 2013, Cecil Sharp Project 2012); Boston Globe Top 10 Albums of the Year (Golden Apples of the Sun 2009); National Public Radio Top 10 Folk Albums of the Year (Lantana 2008); Texas Music Magazine 50 Classic Texas Albums (Twilight 2001 – awarded in 2012); MS Institute of Arts and Letters Best Popular Music Recording (Camilla and Golden Apples of the Sun).
Caroline’s song Mistress (Wellspring 2003) is on the Texas Music Magazine Best Texas Songs of All Time list (awarded 2012), as well as the Atlanta Journal Constitution 100 Best Songs about the South.
Mary Chapin Carpenter calls Herring “an artist who is fearless and uncompromising in her work. As a witness, a historian, a truth teller, a gypsy, a mother, a sister, and a lover, Herring takes the listener on a journey with her head and her heart ... and there is no more enlightening experience one could have."
Herring has participated in multiple musical collaborations:
*She co-founded Thacker Mountain Radio in 1997, a live-audience musical and literary broadcast which airs to this day each Saturday evening on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
*She participated in the 100thAnniversary of Eudora Welty’s birth in a series of concerts with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kate Campbell and Claire Holley.
*In 2011, Herring was the only artist from the United States chosen to participate in The Cecil Sharp Project, an eight-artist collaboration in Shrewsbury, England. The group released a live recording and toured throughout the UK, playing both at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival and at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.
Herring enjoys teaches song-crafting, most recently in 2017 at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky and in the summer of 2016 at Camp DeSoto for Girls in Alabama. Herring lectures both on the history of American traditional musical styles and the art of storytelling through songwriting. She has lectured at the University of Tubingen, Germany and most recently at Emory University, Oxford in January 2018. In June 2018 Herring will perform and lead a series of lectures and concerts for World Refugee Day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
As a writer, Herring is best known both for her songs based on literary works and for her historical story songs based on real-life persons. These include “Mistress,” based on a 19th-century slave named Rachel and her lover, Columbus Patton; “Paper Gown,” about child murderer Susan Smith; “Tales of the Islander,” based on American painter Walter Inglis Anderson; “White Dress,” about Mae Frances Moultrie, one of the 1961 Freedom Riders; “Black Mountain Lullaby,” about Jeremy Davidson, a child killed during an Appalachian mountaintop removal mining incident; and “Camilla,” about Marion King, who suffered a miscarriage after being severely beaten by deputy sheriff in Georgia during the Albany Movement in 1962.
In 2015, Herring earned Georgia State University’s first Master’s Certificate in Applied Linguistics. Over the past four years, Herring has taught almost 100 refugee women from 20 different nations ESOL and Civics through Friends of Refugees programs in Clarkston, GA.