LANTANA SONG BY SONG 

Stone Cold World

Stone Cold World physically refers to Newfoundland, a remote island on the eastern edge of Canada. I went there on a visit to Memorial University in St. John, when I was thinking about pursuing a doctorate in folklore. After visiting that beautiful but cold place, I decided to go to U of Texas instead! The island is a hard rock; there is almost no vegetation and until recently most have made their living through the cod fishing industry. Metaphorically the song describes my first year of marriage. We all have our childhood fantasies, and during that year I learned the hard way to exist beyond myself, literally how to be married, and how to adapt to a new city. I did so in the midst of serious changes in my career, my health, and the health of other family members. For me, it’s a song about the essentiality of sacrifice and the inevitability of change.

Lay My Burden Down

Lay My Burden Down is about dying, and wondering what comes after death.  When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi in Southern Studies, I took on a multimedia project on Heaven as a project for my documentary film class. When I told my professor what I intended to do he started laughing! I visited the local nursing home, Gracelands Inc., and asked residents what they thought Heaven might be like. As rude and tactless as my question was, I received some fascinating answers. One 105-year-old woman said to me, “I don’t know what heaven’s going to be like, I’ve never been there!” So she definitely made it into this song. Also, my mother-in-law found out she had stage three abdominal cancer just three months after my husband and I married, and I have observed at close range as she has stared death in the face on an almost a monthly basis. Finally, I’m a HUGE Thomas Dorsey fan, and I love the image of the lion and the lamb which he used in There Will Be Peace in the Valley for Me.

Paper Gown

The song “Paper Gown” is about Susan Smith, the 23-year-old from Union, South Carolina who drowned her sons in hopes of securing the love of a man who didn’t want a “ready-made” family. In this song I examine the roots of that unfathomable act, and the gruesome childhood and early adulthood that Smith experienced.

Murder ballads are one of the oldest forms of balladry, and there are hundreds of them, most written about men killing women (Little Sadie, Knoxville Girl, Omie Wise, Tom Dooley, Banks of the Ohio, etc.). There are a few which deal with women killing men, the most prominent being Frankie and Johnny. I am fascinated by the recent growth of contemporary female murder ballad writing, including Caleb Meyer by Gillian Welch and Goodbye Earl, a song written by Dennis Linde and sung by the Dixie Chicks. These songs are about women who either strike in self-defense or in revenge for abuse.

In the tradition, however, few write about infanticide. Many writers visit the theme in their books (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, just to name a couple). But in hundreds of years of balladry I could only find one other song on the subject, The Cruel Mother.

Why did I write this song? I did it because Susan Smith’s story is in my opinion the ultimate contemporary southern gothic tale. She was white, female, young, desperate, a mere child raising children in a rural southern town. I found two aspects of the case particularly fascinating: first, that Smith claimed that an African American male kidnapped her sons; and second, that she prayed with the sheriff at the First Baptist Church in Union and finally confessed her crime on the very same day she appeared on national television while conducting a nationwide search for her boys.

In the U.S. South, staggering amounts of violence have been committed in the name of southern white women In this case, it was a white woman who committed murder and was actually convicted of the crime.

Heartbreak Tonight

I once read an article about Loretta Lynn when she and Jack White put out the album Van Lear Rose. In the article she stated that it takes only one of three things to make it in the music business: one has to be first, different, or great. I was so struck by that sentence that I put down the magazine and started writing a song. My protagonist gets a one-and-a-half.  The song is about following established rites of passage associated with becoming a woman and one’s eventual and inevitable questioning of the decision to follow those traditions.

Midnight on the Water

I first heard this beautiful Texas old-time fiddle tune in a nursing home in north Texas, played by the fine fiddler Valerie Ryals. Since that time I’ve come to adore the tune. A heroine of mine, Kate Wolf, had a friend put words to the song and she sang it beautifully on one of her records. I sing it on this record as a tribute both to the lovely fiddle melody and also to one of my favorite singers.

States of Grace

When I first moved to Austin, Texas I came across a South Korean missionary student and his wife. The husband had enrolled in seminary there, and she had followed him presumably for a lifetime career in missionary work in the United States. To me she seemed timid and terrified. Her obvious bravely, however, was what moved me, and it reminded me of a time about fifteen years prior when I did missionary work in China as an adult Chinese English language teacher. Once a student came to my room and attempted to bribe me both by offering me a substantial gift and also by asking me to explain the meaning of the Christian triune God. At that very moment I knew, without a doubt, that I had almost no knowledge of anything except for the fact that this man absolutely had to make a good grade on his exam in order to keep his job and support his family.

All the Pretty Little Horses

An African American slave woman reportedly wrote this lullaby. That fact alone points out the ambivalence associated with this beautiful though haunting melody in which a slave woman sang to her master’s white babies while she had no choice but to neglect her own. For me, it’s one of the most striking melodies I’ve ever heard, and I love singing it to my children.

Fair and Tender Ladies

I have known the ballad Fair and Tender Ladies for years. I remember the first time I heard it on my parents’ turntable on a Newport Folk Festival record. Just as there are countless murder ballads about men who kill women, there are maybe even more songs about fair and tender ladies who die from a broken heart.  In writing this song, I kept the title and rewrote the song about three Mississippi women I admire.

The first verse is about Natasha Trethewey, presently a poet at Emory University. Because she was born in Mississippi to a white father and a black mother, her birth was officially illegal. Her book Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007. The second verse is about Thea Bowman, an African American woman who grew up in my hometown of Canton. Bowman became a nun, took a leadership role in the emerging black Catholic church, earned a PhD, but was most renown for her powerful singing voice. She died of a horrible bone cancer in the 1980s. Thea Bowman lived and worked most of her life a mere four blocks from where I grew up. Unfortunately, and due to a society so committed to separating people from one another, I never met her, heard her sing, or knew she existed. The third verse is about Montie Greer, a white woman from a tiny town called Potts Camp in northern Mississippi. She helped lead the MS chapter of a group called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.  This group helped decrease the number of lynchings which took place in Mississippi in the 1930s, but they contributed mostly by debunking the myth that white men committed lynchings solely in order to protect the sanctity of white womanhood.

Lover Girl

I wrote Lover Girl about my daughter. I remember the first time Carrie saw lantana, which is a flowering plant and incredibly easy to grow. Lantana attracts butterflies, and when Carrie saw this wall of lantana at my friend’s house there were butterflies everywhere. She immediately ran to the lantana bushes and danced with the butterflies. This album represents any person’s dream and effort to make a place home, where one feels safe under the branches of trees and the everyday glories of existence. I dedicated the record to my mother, my sister and my daughter, three females who have each taught me in different ways how to make a home.

Song For Fay

Fay is a character from a Larry Brown novel of the same name. Larry Brown was an acclaimed Mississippi writer who lived in Oxford, Mississippi when I lived there. While in graduate school in Oxford, I joined a band called the Sincere Ramblers and started a radio show called Thacker Mountain Radio in a local independent bookstore. The show has continued for over ten years, and it plays weekly on Mississippi Public Radio. I am so proud to be one of its co-founders.

On one Christmas show, Larry Brown wrote a story specifically for our show. I’ll never forget it, because in the story he said it snowed on Christmas Eve, which never happens in Oxford. Well, that Christmas Eve it did. I decided that if Larry Brown could write a story for us, then I could write a song for him, and for Fay.