Lantana
By Caroline Herring

Signature Sounds

Caroline Herring’s new CD, Lantana, shows her continuing growth as a singer-songwriter, bringing a renewal of sorts to her singing career. Herring, a 1999 graduate of the Southern Studies master’s program, brings her sensitive awareness of the complexities of Southern culture to her songs, along with her introspective imaginings of women’s experiences, in particular new reflections on her life as a mother.

Herring began her singing career in Oxford, Mississippi, with the Sincere Ramblers, a traditional string folk group, and she co-organized Oxford’s live radio show, Thacker Mountain Radio. Her first two CDs, Twilight (2001) and Wellspring (2003), came after she moved to Austin, began performing in that city’s lively musical scene, and started writing her lyrical and probing songs that often drew from her life growing up in Mississippi and her awareness of that state’s sometimes burdened history. Since Herring’s last CD, she married historian Joe Crespino, moved to Atlanta, and became mother to a daughter born in 2004 and a son born last year.

Herring’s songs on Lantana can be easily placed in Mississippi’s rich storytelling tradition. “Fair and Tender Ladies” is a classic mountain song, but Herring updates the lyrics to celebrate three Mississippi women she admires— poet Natasha Trethewey, African American nun Thea Bowman, and Montie Greer, a white woman who led the Mississippi chapter of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (the group that Herring studied for her master’s thesis). The recurring refrain is, “oh heroine of mine.” Herring has an uncanny ability to occupy the spirits of people, especially women characters, in her lyrics. “Song for Fay” is a tribute to Mississippi writer Larry Brown’s character Fay in the novel of the same name. Herring describes another of her original songs, “Heartbreak Tonight,” as being about “following established rites of passage associated with becoming a woman and one’s eventual questioning of the decision to follow traditions.” The songs on this CD can be breathtakingly beautiful, as in “Midnight on the Water,” which is an old-time fiddle tune that she first heard in a nursing home in north Texas. The narrator stands watching the stillness of the water at a lake, a scene that takes her back to aching memories of a lost love. Herring’s questing spirit even tackles death and imaginings of the afterlife. She attributes “Lay My Burden Down” in part to her work with a multimedia project on heaven for a documentary studies class in Southern Studies, where she interviewed residents of a nursing home in Oxford about their images of heaven. She movingly evokes poetic images of the other world.

Two songs stand out on this album of consistently fine work, both dealing with mothers but in strikingly different ways. “Paper Gown” is a recounting of the horrific story of Susan Smith, the 23-year-old South Carolina woman who drowned her two young sons in hopes of gaining the love of a man who did not want a family. It is a contemporary Southern gothic tale, chillingly told with a level of detail that shows underlying themes of race, religion, and family life that will long haunt the listener.

Herring’s gentleness is seen in “Lover Girl,” a song she wrote for her little girl, Carrie. She uses the recurring image of hands—telling her to “put your little hand in mine” at one point, and asking her to “put your little hands together and pray for your mama” at another. The album title comes from this song. Carrie saw lantana growing profusely and ran to dance with the butterflies that flower attracts. It’s a lovely image, and this appealing scene is an appropriate one to best characterize this integrated work that shows Herring celebrating and meditating upon the life of Southern women, young and old, herself included.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON