Tricia Walker’s southern heritage inspires Heart of Dixie concert at Renaissance Center
Release Date: 8/14/2007. Expired: 8/25/2007
Growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1960s, Tricia Walker had a front-row view of the Civil Rights movement from her own front porch. Decades later the award-winning singer-songwriter travels back in time to that critical era and place in a multimedia concert of music and stories called The Heart of Dixie.
The Renaissance Center in Dickson presents The Heart of Dixie in one special performance Saturday, Aug. 25. Tickets for the 7 p.m. show are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $10 for children under 13.
Walker, who recently returned to her home state to direct the Delta Music Institute at Delta State University, has been a fixture on the Nashville songwriting scene for years and was one of the original Women in the Round at the famous Bluebird Café.
She has earned songwriting honors at the Mississippi and American Song Festivals, was a New Folk winner at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival and has been a featured performer at Tin Pan South in Nashville, South by Southwest Music Festival in Texas and Crossroads Festival in Memphis. Her songs have been recorded by Mel McDaniel, Patty Loveless, Alison Krauss, Faith Hill, Moe Bandy, The Imperials and others.
The Heart of Dixie began as a song idea Walker carried around for years. The song grew into a concept for an album of songs that tell stories. The album grew into a multimedia journey that offers the personal reflections of a white Southerner growing up in small-town Mississippi in the ‘60s at the height of the Civil Rights movement.
“I carried the idea for the song The Heart of Dixie around in my writing notebook for nine years. I kept trying to write it and I would start and stop, start and stop until I finally realized that it would be written when it was time to be written,” Walker says. “One fall, I took a weekend trip to an old sulphur water spa town in Tennessee called Red Boiling Springs and checked into one of two small historic hotels there. I happened to be the only guest registered that night, so I had the place to myself.
“I had with me my writing guitar, a 1970 Fender Newporter acoustic that I had in college. It carried a great deal of sentimental value for me, so I pulled out my notebook and tape recorder and, as the Benedictines say, ‘I began again.’ But this time, I could feel the song moving towards completion and I suddenly felt a sweet contentment at its finish. The last few lines of the song fell onto the page from that place of grace far beyond my intellect. I felt grateful.”
Walker began to put together a collection of songs to round out the concept of The Heart of Dixie, turning to some of her favorite writers and songs.
“As a writer myself, I realized that these writers had written exactly what I wanted to say, so there was no point in me trying to write it again,” she explains.
Walker had worked with Kate Campbell in writing All the Way Home and turned to her Funeral Food and New South for some “lighter” songs, but included Campbell’s Look Away and Crazy in Alabama as a pair of tunes that “come perhaps the closest of all to expressing my feelings about my strong connection and love of the South, her history and her people.”
One of the classic southern story songs of all times is Ode to Billie Joe, written by fellow Mississippian Bobbie Gentry and found its place on The Heart of Dixie “because I just love to sing it,” Walker said.
Other classic songs about the south such as Walker’s own Honey Chile, Feels Like Mississippi by Fred Knobloch, Page Out of History by Kenny Meeks and Keb Mo’s Henry are joined by an a cappella version of Dixie to round out a musical journey into the heart of a region that probably has the most identifiable personality, history and aura of any part of the United States.
“Culture is a precious, living thing,” Walker says. “It has to be nurtured if it’s going to survive. Any artist or creative thinker has a responsibility to help chronicle his or her own time, place and people. That’s the surest way to keep a culture from disappearing.”
Walker has performed with Connie Smith, Paul Overstreet, Russ Taff and Shania Twain, and joined Ashley Cleveland, Karen Staley and Pam Tillis for a songwriters’ night at the Bluebird Café in Nashville more than 20 years ago that became known as the Women in the Round.
After more than 25 years in Nashville, Walker returned to Fayette, Miss., in July to her new position with Delta State University, where she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Music Education.
Delta State’s Delta Music Institute allows students to study music engineering, music production and video editing, as well as contemporary composition and study musical theory and practice.
For more information on Tricia Walker’s The Heart of Dixie performance at The Renaissance Center, call (615) 740-5600 or visit www.rcenter.org. To purchase tickets, call (615) 740-5601.
The Renaissance Center is a fine arts education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.
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