Used with permission of CMA Closeup News Service
By Michael McCall
Faith Hill peppers her conversation with sudden bursts of uninhibited laughter and with phrases like "Bless your heart," "Oh my gosh," "God bless them," "Isn't that sweet?" and "Don't you just love her?"
In other words, she sounds exactly like thousands of other 30-something women raised in religious families in small Southern towns. Like many others, she moved to the city, worked hard, found success and gave shape to her dreams. Yet she held onto a piece of her rural identity, not only in the way she talks, but in the way she lives. As the song says, "a Mississippi girl don't change her ways just 'cause everybody knows her name."
Only now, after Hurricane Katrina, taking pride in being a Mississippi native has assumed new layers of meaning. As with many things creative, Hill's artistic move has, by coincidence, taken on significance she never could have predicted.
"I'm so glad I am out there telling the world I'm from Mississippi right now," Hill said. "It's something I've always been proud of, but with all the devastation and damage, there's a lot of concern and I'm feeling a lot of connection."
For Hill, Mississippi's plight resembles experiencing a loved one facing a serious illness. Suddenly she wants to visit more often, and home occupies a larger part of her thoughts and her heart.
"I have so many friends and relatives along the coast," she explained. "They're doing OK, but you worry about them more. My parents and my older brother live north of the coast, and they were without power or water for about a week and a half or two weeks. There were a lot of trees down in Star, but it's nothing like on the coast."
Hill has toured the damaged areas along the Gulf Coast, and as with other eyewitnesses, she says that television footage and print photos can't convey the vastness of the damage. "I couldn't believe it when I went there to see it," she explained. "It's just mind-blowing, the devastation. I'd spent a lot of time there in the past, and I'd just recently been to Biloxi to work before all this happened. The amount of destruction is just unbelievable. It was so widespread and so far inland."
The storms and floods came as the single, "Mississippi Girl," from Hill's album Fireflies gained daily radio play and sat at the top of the charts. What surprised Hill was how she had to defend her choice to record a song about her raising and defend putting it on an album that had a more stripped-down, acoustic sound than her two previous albums, 2002's Cry and 1999's Breathe.
"There's been so much said about it, and a lot of it is just plain wrong," she said. "But how do you defend it? Oh my gosh, I've even had the question, 'Is your hair dark now because you're going back to your roots?'"
She lets out one of her characteristic bursts of laughter. "I mean, what do you say to that? Is that supposed to be a joke?"
She continues to laugh, but it dies down to a somber chuckle as she shakes her head in disbelief. "You know, to me, I've never left my roots behind," she continued. "I didn't on Cry, and I didn't on Breathe. They just sound differently because at that time, I was interested in going into a different part of who I am and what I want to sing. I cut my musical teeth in the church, in raise-the-roof Pentecostal churches. Of course, I was raised on Country Music as well, on Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn and George and Dolly and Reba.
"But those are two different things - the church music and the Country Music. So my musical tastes are so extreme. I feel like I'm influenced by all the music I grew up with, and all the music that I love listening to now. Trying to find my place in all that is sometimes very complicated."
She accepts that her decisions can be confusing to others. "I know that Cry wasn't something that worked for Country radio, but it sold 3 million copies, and no one ever talks about that," she said with a laugh. "It's written about like it was a bomb, but it wasn't. I'm still very proud of it."
What she can't accept, she says, is people describing Fireflies as a calculated move - a return to straightforward Country Music inspired only by business, not artistic merit.
"That doesn't even fit into my realm of reality," she said. "I couldn't be less like that. The toughest part of all this is hearing that kind of criticism. That's what hurts. People mistake your actions for ... whatever. When someone can't see that things are honest and come from your heart, that's difficult to take. But I'm a big girl. You just have to stand tall and walk forward."