Kate Campbell

This chapter examines the work of Kate Campbell, a lesser-known southern singer-songwriter in Americana and gospel genres who has widely acknowledged O’Connor’s influence on her songwriting and sensibilities. A Mississippi-raised daughter of a progressive Baptist minister, Campbell is a sort of inverse double to O’Connor, this chapter argues. Campbell’s Rosaryville (1999) songs take a Southern Baptist perspective on the religious practices and eccentricities of the South’s Catholics. Other songs in her considerable catalogue of recordings reveal what O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted” religious culture of the South and echo Lucinda Williams in their treatment of extreme practices in southern Pentecostalism. This chapter also shows that, like O’Connor, Campbell has a comic outlook and delights in skewering southern manners in compassionate songs with a strain of gothic humor that are send-ups of southern traditions and social practices.