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Folk Alley
Jim Blum
February 16, 2008
Caroline Herring ~ Lantana Caroline Herring interrupted her music career for a few years to raise a family. With this album she is arriving as a professional poet who delivers in song. Herring's stories ring of her native Mississippi and her years in Texas but she uses sophisticated city smart dialogue to tell these stories. The clearest example may be "Fair and Tender Ladies." She borrowed the old song title and delivers a new message and a new melody. Instead of women being painted as delicate, she tells us of three very tough ladies from her home state, a poet, a nun, and an anti-lynching activist. Clever.
"Stone Cold World" was inspired from a trip to Newfoundland as she was surprised
by all the rocks and the lack of vegetation. She saw a simliarty to her own life as she
was learning how to "exist outside myself." She was trying to learn how to accept big
changes and how to sacrifice. She also writes about the woman from South Carolina
who drowned her children in a car in the song "Paper Gown." Herring is not hesitant
to uncover any story, even the ones most of us avoid. She would make a good
reporter, except she has too much music in her. That's our good fortune.
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