CAMILLA song by song
Camilla is about Marion King, a woman from Albany, Georgia, who went to see her friend’s daughter at the Camilla jail in July 1962 and was beat unconscious by the deputy sheriff there for singing and standing too close to the jail. King was six months pregnant and soon after miscarried. She later went to law school and became an attorney for the City of Atlanta.
Black Mountain Lullaby is about three-year-old Jeremy Davidson. He was crushed to death in August 2004 by an enormous boulder dislodged by night workers from a mountaintop removal mine site above his family's trailer in Inman Hollow, Virginia.
Fireflies is about a little girl chasing fireflies.
Maiden Voyage is about Herring’s trip with her four-year-old daughter to the Obama Presidential Inauguration in January 2009. Herring and her daughter did not actually attend the Inauguration because of a malfunction at their gate, which kept out several thousand people.
Traveling Shoes is based on the Eudora Welty short story A Worn Path.
Summer Song is a song about dealing with grief through embracing the sacredness and perseverance of nature.
White Dress is about then 24-year-old Mae Frances Moultrie, the only African-American female on the original Freedom Ride in 1961. Her bus passed through Anniston, Alabama and was firebombed. Moultrie exited the burning bus wearing a white dress.
Until You Go is about the depths of grief and what one finds there.
Flee as a Bird is a Christian hymn written and composed by Mary S.B. Dana Schindler, published in The Southern Harp in 1840 and The Northern Harp in 1841. Mary grew up in a slave-holding family in Beaufort, S.C. before pioneering westward with her husband. Tragedy struck when her newborn son and husband died of a fever within days of each other. Mary returned to South Carolina, lost and regained her faith, remarried, and moved to the northeastern US where she became an abolitionist.
Joy Never Ends (Auld Lang Syne) is primarily about a conversation Herring had on an airplane from Atlanta to Dallas with a 26-year-old fighter pilot named Lee and a Chinese-Canadian romance writer named Ming on Herring’s way to her cousin’s wedding.
