Julie Lee Sings A New Song In Music City

When Julie Lee moved South to Tennessee from her native Maryland a decade ago, she found a new spiritual home.

Her eyes and ears absorbed new experiences - Nashville bluegrass, life in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, and a Presbyterian church that welcomed her creative imagination.

The result for this rising singer- songwriter and visual artist has been an adventure in gospel truth and social witness.

"Being in the Bible belt made me want to find new ways to say things about faith," says Lee, who lives in Nashville and attends Downtown Presbyterian Church.

"I've learned about the power of stories, the way the gospel can come through that way. I've learned from the people here. Living in a multi­racial neighborhood changed me. I got to know the neighbors and started feeling like a true neighbor. I'm always discovering misconceptions I have about other people and trying to eradicate those misconceptions."

Lee, 39, is establishing a Christian artistic identity by following her own well-traveled instincts. She rummages around junk yards looking for old objects to enrich her visual work in collage, assemblage and found­object art. She delves into family history, daily headlines and Scripture for her lyrics and music. Whether visual art or music, it all connects past and present, pain and hope, truth and art.

Her latest CD, Stillhouse Road, honors rural memories of her grandparents (immortalizing favorite family cornbread recipes) and exalts the love of Jesus too. Her voice comes through with an ache of passion and compassion; her sound is an acoustic quilt of bluegrass and folk, with echoes of gospel and blues.

A Julie Lee record might include her own lyrics, or words stitched from John Bunyan, Frederick Buechner or the Gospels. The accumulating effect is an invitation to hope and encouragement.

"Love, set me as a seal upon your heart/As a seal upon your arm/Love's as strong as death/Oh, Love's as strong as death," she declares in the song Many Waters on Stillhouse Road.

One of her most powerful songs, called James, was inspired by a racial atrocity, the 1998 murder of James Byrd in Texas, a young African American dragged from the back of a truck and killed. Lee sees a straight line, a tragic thread, stretching from the Book of Genesis to the young man's death - the reality of sin, humanity's cruel, hapless rebellion against God.

She sings: "Cain had a seed in his heart/Cain had a stick in his eye/And he was not able to see/That hate made his heart grow hard/And made Abel's blood run cold/Callin' from the ground to you and me."

Julie Lee came to Nashville in 1995 with her band called The Rest, a folk trio that eventually broke up after arriving. Lee's musical interests moved toward the rustic sounds of Americana, which embodied emotions of real life and real faith to her.

"The closer I got to bluegrass and roots music, the more I felt, 'This is it, this is where God wants me to be,' " she says.

"I wanted to write songs that make a listener say, 'What is this?' and not say, 'Oh, this is just another Christian artist imitating what's already been done.' "

She was also making visual art. In the late-1990s, she met up with Nashville's Downtown Presbyterian Church, which had started an unusual program of honoring artists by allowing them studio space in the church. Lee used her studio in exchange for working with the congregation's homeless ministries and children's programs. Her experience brought her art and music closer to the grit and pain of the world. She was inspired to record three CDs in the church - "Stones," "Many Waters" and "Made from Scratch."

In 2000, she accepted a year's stint as artist-in-residence in Belfast, Northern Ireland , based in a Presbyterian dorm at Queen's University.

"It all opened my mind to look past my white-bread experience and see how God is at work in all kinds of cultures and places," she says.

After she returned to Nashville, she signed a music publishing deal that resulted in Stillhouse Road. The doors of Music City were opening: new friendships yielded guest appearances on the CD by Alison Krauss, Vince Gill and other stellar musicians.

Despite good reviews and regular playing gigs, she still has to keep her day job; these days she works as a nanny. But art still drives her, the compulsion to "sing a new song" as the Psalms declare.

"I keep writing because that's where the Spirit's at," she says. "I hope the songs speak to people. ... Harlan Howard once said that songwriting is about 'three chords and the truth.' That pretty much sums it up. I long to encourage people - to say something of importance."

For more of Julie Lee go to www.julielee.org

(Ray Waddle, a writer based in Nashville, is author of Against the Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes.)