Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and musicians.
To celebrate the beauty of springtime, the exuberance of rebirth, and the cycle of life, we’ve compiled a set of 10 songs by North Carolina artists that use planting and gardening either as literal topics or as metaphors for being firmly rooted to Mother Earth.
Bookending our playlist are two very different songs by Greensboro-born Rhiannon Giddens: the buoyant “Country Girl,” from Leaving Eden, an album by her former string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and “In a Garden So Green,” a more somber Celtic folk song that she recorded with fiddle player Mara Shea and guitarist Roger Gold of the Durham duo Elftones.
Elsewhere, Rissi Palmer, also of Durham, uses “Seeds” as a metaphor for growing a strong and resilient community; James Taylor, raised in Chapel Hill, sings of a “Blossom” that could be interpreted either literally or figuratively, as a woman he’s asking to “bring sunshine down my way”; and the late Doc Watson of Deep Gap uses the embryonic plant form of a bud in “Gathering Buds” as a metaphor to ease the pain of losing a child: “Jesus is gathering, day by day, buds for the palace of Heaven / Full-blooming flowers alone will not do, some must be young and ungrown.”
Songwriters have long used the idea of gardening in themes ranging from spiritual enlightenment to fertility — and sometimes both. Take “Forbidden Fruit” by legendary Tryon-born singer Nina Simone. In this playful number, Simone offers a little wink as she sings, “Eve and Adam had a garden, everything was great / Till one day a boy says, ’Pardon Miss, my name is Snake. / See that apple over yonder? If you’ll take a bite / You and Adam both are bound to have some fun tonight.’”
Rounding out the set: the quirky “Mushrooms are Growing After the Rain,” by Troutman-born country singer Jim Lauderdale; “The Garden Song,” by Asheville singer-songwriter Ryan Gustafso (aka The Dead Tongues); “In the Garden,” a timeless gospel standard sung by country singer Randy Travis of Marshville; and “Root Like a Rose,” by country singer Emmylou Harris, who grew up in Cherry Point and attended UNCG.
So break out your shovels and hoes — we’re sure you’re going to dig this set of songs.
North Carolina is known for many things, but nothing more important this week than the qualities of endurance, resilience, and hope.
By day, this adventure park in the Triad is a fall festival to die for. By night, the undead come alive for Halloween tricks. Welcome to one man’s vision of year-round merrymaking.
North Carolina’s border dances across the mountains as it traces four different states. Life here can be more remote, but good neighbors are never far away.
The Blue Ridge Parkway stands out among America’s national parks: Unfurling across six Appalachian mountain chains, it connects dozens of rural communities and binds together generations of families through shared memories.
