Murphy Campbell is on a mission to preserve the sound of Yancey and Mitchell counties. It’s also the sound of her family.
On her 19 birthday last year, she stumbled into a lost collection of ballads from the region that were written hundreds of years ago, some of them by her distant family members.
Now, she's recording them for the first time, hoping they live on forever.
At first, she wasn’t sure what to do with the songs — some hadn’t been sung in the past century. So, she did something she says helps her clear her head: visit her great-grandparents at the Rebels Creek Cemetery.
“I drove up the hill and sat on their grave and I do something kind of silly where I might talk out loud a little bit, even though I know they're not going to answer me at that moment, but they may in a different way,” she said.
Driving down the hill from the cemetery, she visited the church where her great-grandparents used to play music. She had one word stuck in her head: Revenant.
“I'm thinking to myself about how strong the culture is, to continually appear again and again. And it's like every time we seem to think something is lost and the culture comes right back,” she said. “It's dead, come back. That's what it is.”
As Campbell looked through the ballads, she started noticing the same date over and over again — her birthday.
“From the moment I found these ballads on my birthday…I had just this really strange feeling. It felt like they were supposed to come to me at this point in time,” she said.
“I have a great understanding of my family's ancestry and where we're from, and suddenly I have these fragments of music from my family and it was just an amazing moment. I remember sitting at my computer finding this stuff and just having a chill run down my spine.”
The lyrics to these ballads are timeless and, at times, haunting. So is Campbell, who said for her, the past is just as real as the present.
“I have these fragments of these people that are dead. But because I have these fragments of their lives, I can't help but feel sometimes that they're present while I'm working on them,” she said. “I feel very guided by these dead women. I know they're not ghosts that are hanging out in my room or anything, but they live in these songs. They really do.”
Campbell plans to record the songs inside a church in Mitchell County, close to where her great-grandparents are buried. She has recently started a fundraising campaign for the record.
