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Watch an interview with David Perkins and hear his music at www.gcsu.edu/connectionmagazine
crossing nearly every musical genre. He played bluegrass with fiddle-great Vassar Clements, Texas renegade country with Jerry Jeff Walker, pop with Carole King, alternative rock with Chagall Guevara, Americana with Guy Clark, soul-country with Ray Charles, blues and jazz with violinist Papa John Creach and the list goes on. Along the way, David “married a girl from Nashville,” as he says. Their family grew (they have five children), and as a result, he began to limit his touring schedule. He concentrated, instead, on studio work and producing albums. In 1996, he took a break from music. He told his wife that if he could get into Vanderbilt Divinity School, he’d attend for one semester and read philosophy and theology, something he always enjoyed doing. “I fell in love with it, and it was another kind of creative work for me,” he says. David ended up completing a master’s in theological studies and rolled that into a master’s of divinity degree. “I realized there were some things behind my desire to study; things that were more important life issues that I hadn’t explored before.” So, he plowed ahead into the intensive world of pursuing a “Ph.D.” while garnering a fellowship at Vanderbilt’s Center for the Study of Religion and Culture. But his music didn’t die.
At Vanderbilt Divinity School
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Georgia College Connection • Fall 2009
In 2009, his O’Connoresque album, titled Pistol City Holiness, was released to critical applause. It is a farewell album of sorts. “It was conceived when I thought maybe I would study for longer than one semester, as I intended,” David recalls. “I wanted to do one more album, and, I wanted to go out playing the music that first impacted me - southern blues - and do it with the people I had played with the longest.” He and his friends started laying tracks down and came up with nearly two-thirds of the material. And