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Delta Magazine
Mary Warner
March, 2008
After a long winter, Caroline Herring's new album Lantana welcomes spring. Following up 2003's Wellspring, her latest album intersperses sunny roots-music with slow, sobering tunes. Filled with profound songs that reveal a quiet elegance, Herring's music often seeks to self-examine. In "Stone Cold World," the first song on Lantana, she calls herself a "selfish girl." The way she has lived, however, reflects anything but that sentiment. She's a giver. In the late 1990s Herring was a graduate student of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi where she played with the Sincere Ramblers. She
made her mark with that old time county band, but it was arguably Thacker Mountain Radio, a show that she began with fellow band member Bryan Ledford, which propelled her musical career.
Though now based in Atlanta, Herring's voice lingers on in albums like Lantana. Sweet, but not saccharine, Herring distills a kind of honesty about the past seen too little today.
Her lyrics and musical arrangements evoke a simpler time and southern, especially Mississippi, heritage. She crosses boundaries few would have crossed just decades ago with her inclusion of "All the Pretty Horses," a traditional lullaby written by an African American slave woman. Other songs, such as "Fair and Tender Ladies," begin with cheerful banjo strumming. Dedicated to Mississippi poet Natasha Trethewey, as well as a nun, and an anti-lynching activist, it plays on the title of a traditional song with the same
name, except her version praises women's courage. Lantana moves from hopeful to
hopeless. Not quite merry, but just as affecting, is "Heartbreak Tonight," a narrative song about the way our lives are altered by simply changing our names. The music is lovingly
rendered, but it's the story that lures us in. As a Southerner of Mississippi, that Herring can lure us in with words is no surprise. This album is a testament not only to her ability as a musician, but also as a storyteller who happens to set her tales, woeful and happy, to music.
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