She had been a star in the ’50s and ’60s in the borderlands of northeastern Maryland and Southern Pennsylvania. (Ramone, real name Thomas Erdelyi, died in 2014.)ĭuring the recording session, Ramone was floored when he found out that Ola Belle Reed, a legendary old-time performer, was Campbell’s aunt.
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Ramone produced the Hard Facts’ second album, accepting a single joint as full compensation, according to Campbell.
By the mid-’80s, his group Hard Facts had a loyal following and garnered the attention of Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, who happened to be a serious aficionado of bluegrass and mountain music. He went on to lead several, including Satan’s Slaves and the Dry Drunks, among other ill-fated outfits. He had dropped out of the University of Maryland and headed to Manhattan during the late ’70s - the tail end of punk rock - to join a band.
In his younger years, he was too busy with his own fledgling music career to spend time or energy defending the honor of country music. But the early country performers had dignity they took their music seriously.”Ĭampbell was not always such a purist. “I watched it growing up, but I hated it,” he told me.
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You can’t get higher on the food chain in literature than James Joyce.” He talked about his favorite medieval poets, like François Villon, and he went on a tirade against “Hee Haw,” the country-music variety TV show, for the way he says it made a travesty of the rural Southern culture he came from. Have you heard the ‘Ballad of the Joking Jesus’ from Ulysses? I set that to country music. He told me his songwriting models came not so much from classic country but from the Classics: “I love Ulysses. He often breaks into song, belting out snatches of his hundreds of lyrics, some decades old, some written yesterday. He tells self-deprecating, off-color stories about himself and his family, punctuated by maniacal laughing jags. In person, he is a natural raconteur with the edge of a shock jock. Instead, he regaled me with anecdotes and allusions about his heroes and influences, many of them from his family tree. I went to Campbell’s house in Elkton to pay my respects, but I soon realized that the album, much less himself, was the last thing he wanted to talk about. (Full disclosure: I ended up writing the liner notes for Zane’s 2017 album “Ola Wave.” My compensation was a few beers and copies of the CD.) I knew this was something special, and I confirmed it with friends who’d had a similar epiphany. I wanted to learn more about the force behind the best country album I’d heard in years - a low-budget CD released on an unknown label, homemade and visionary and raw with just enough varnish to brighten its inner darkness, like a modern-day William Blake singing bare-bones, hardcore country. But if that was even possible, Kitchens, as he was about to learn, would first have to save Campbell from himself.Ĭountry singer-songwriter Zane Campbell and his guitar at his home in Elkton, Md. To Kitchens, Campbell was the kind of artist who could save country music from what he felt it had become: heartland consumerism run amok. “I was thinking, ‘Here’s the best country singer in Maryland or anywhere else at a godd- nursing home in Cecil County.’ ” This wasn’t oldies nostalgia but a form of catharsis. But the music clearly meant just as much to Campbell himself. The familiar songs meant a lot to these folks. He included weepers like Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” a favorite with the audience that often spurred lonely hearts to do just that. He sounded like a mountain opera singer.”Ĭampbell played several sets that kept Kitchens and the residents - among them Campbell’s 90-year-old mother, Eva, and his Aunt Darthula - riveted. “I’d never heard anybody sing with that kind of command,” Kitchens says, “and with all the inflections and nuance in his voice tones and the crazy notes he was hitting, from a growl to a tremble. What he was hearing in Elkton weren’t just tasteful cover versions but masterful interpretations of the country-and-western canon that rivaled the originals. Kitchens had grown up with a Vietnam vet father playing classic country records around the house in Owensboro, Ky. Beyond the sheer force of Campbell’s presence, there was also his remarkable vocal range.
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