*** Kate Campbell

VISIONS OF PLENTY

(Compass)

Once described as Bobbie-Gentry-meets-Eudora-Welty, Mississippi singer/songwriter Kate Campbell loves her homeland, but -- like Texas's Terry Allen -- she also sees its foibles. When in one song Christ's face appears on a garden tomato, Campbell -- the daughter of a Baptist minister -- serves God's angry lawyer a BLT. Elsewhere, she remembers the civil-rights movement she watched take shape as a wide-eyed child, revealing the traumatic impact it had on her home state in a way that outsider protest singers in the '60s couldn't begin to comprehend.

-- Bruce Sylvester