Since the Southern Register last reported on the career of Caroline Herring, a 1999 graduate of the Southern Studies Program, she has found herself experiencing a number of changes. When we last visited with her she was living in Austin, Texas, and had recently released her first album, Twilight, on the Blue Corn Music label. The Austin American-Statesman had just named her Best New Artist, she had won Best New Artist honors at the Austin Music Awards during the South by Southwest music festival, and it seemed she was about to take the city by storm. Then something happened: She married Stanford graduate Joe Crespino, and her husband’s academic career required that they move from the state’s capital to the nation’s capital. “She’d had such wonderful acceptance in Austin,” Denby Auble, the founder of Blue Corn Music, says, “it was traumatic almost to move away from that–from her primary fan base, her band, her home.” A year later, Herring and her husband moved again, this time from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta where he teaches history at Emory.

Originally from Canton, Mississippi, Herring spent a number of years in Oxford as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University. She wrote her master’s thesis on the Mississippi Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, drawing from history and documentary studies. Also while at the University, Herring first got her feet wet in public performance. She was a founding member of the Sincere Ramblers, a traditional/bluegrass local band that eventually became the first house band for Thacker Mountain Radio.

After receiving her M.A. in Southern Studies, Herring moved west to Austin in 1999 to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Texas and to work as a program coordinator for the Texas Folklife Resources. But Herring’s interest in music hadn’t waned. She recorded a music demo and shopped it around Austin, landing a three-week happy hour trial at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, which turned into a two-year weekly Thursday night gig. It was there that she was discovered by Auble. Her first album was the label’s first.

Soon Herring found herself playing at such prestigious festivals as the Newport Folk Festival and Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival, and Country Music Television speculated that Herring “may well be the next big thing to emerge from the Live Music Capital of the World.” Emerge she did, and Herring’s latest effort promises to solidify her reputation as “the next big thing.” Herring’s Wellspring has seen her mature into one of country music’s most talented new voices, reminiscent of such folk superstars as Nanci Griffith and Gillian Welch.

The new album’s centerpiece is “Mistress,” an achingly beautiful narrative of an East Texas slave and mistress to her plantation owner. “I’m most proud of this song,” Herring says. “Colorado Woman” is energetic and infectious roots pop that finds its narrator standing her ground in the face of life’s travails. The opening song, “Trace,” is a rural, homespun folk in which Herring recalls the history of an old friend’s home off of the Natchez Trace, and the experience of having to start all over again in a new city is reflected in Wellspring ’s powerful closer, “Tacoma Blues”: “I’m standing in the shadows/I’m howling at the sound/Inspiration fails me and/Nothing seems to ease me/Sad songs could drive me down/Drive me down/Another day of rain/In another town.