MOUNT JULIET, Tenn. — Will Davis Campbell grew up during the Depression years in Amite County, Miss. He has been called a bootleg preacher, an agitator, a liberal and several things not fit to print. He generally describes himself as one who “writes rare books for a living.”
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ampbell, who turned 80 last July (2004), does not seem to have lost sleep over what others think or say about him. He has never offered himself as a model for ecclesiastical excellence. Yet Campbell’s unique ministry has touched the famous and the forgotten. His words — written, spoken or sung — knock the varnish off pretense and cause a re-examination of faith commitments claimed. Campbell is best known for Brother to a Dragonfly (1977, Continuum Press), a moving account of his deep involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and of his close and painful relationship with his beloved brother Joe. An anniversary edition with a foreword by President Jimmy Carter was released in 2000. Will’s late father, a longtime Baptist deacon, excused his son’s stark language in the book that some found offensive, saying: “My boy was writing about hornets’ nests.” Although that book won the Lillian Smith Prize, Campbell considers his 1982 novel, The Glad River (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), to be his best writing. The novella, Cecilia’s Sin (1983, Mercer University Press), was spun off of that book. These two works of fiction reveal Campbell’s interest in Anabaptist history.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Will Campbell died June 3 at age 88. In tribute, we are revisiting this feature story that appeared in the January 2005 issue of Baptists Today.
Other titles include Forty Acres and a Goat (1986, Peachtree Publishers), The Convention: A Parable (1988, Peachtree Publishers), Providence (1992, Longstreet Press) and The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960s Southern School (1995, Mercer University Press). Campbell’s most recent release is Robert G. Clark’s Journey to the House: A Black Politician’s Story (2003, University Press of Mississippi). Baptists Today editor John Pierce spent a September (2004) morning with Brother Will at his writing cabin on the spread of land near Nashville that he and his wife Brenda have shared for more than four decades. The conversation was rambling, often off subject and simply delightful. The following exchange is pulled from that interview. BT: How did you first meet Waylon Jennings?
WC: Right here in this cabin. A fellow named Johnny Darrow, who never had but one big song and I forgot what it was, wanted me to do his wedding. Waylon was his best man. I got to the part about “Who brings this woman to be married to this man?” and nobody said anything. The girl’s daddy was here, but he was nervous. So Waylon said, “I do.” We just kind of hit it off. I married everybody in his band at least once and all of their kids. I baptized [his son] little Shooter when he was about six months old. I asked: “What are we doing here? I’m a deep-water Baptist, and we baptize by dunking adults — or we call them adults, though they may not be any more aware than this baby.” Now [Waylon’s wife] Jessi [Colter] was a United Pentecostal; her mama was a big-time Pentecostal preacher, and Waylon was an acapella Campbellite from Littlefield, Texas. July 2013
I asked Waylon, “How are we doing this?” About that time, Mohammed Ali came by. He was a friend of Waylon’s. I said, “I want to do it the way he wants it done.” He’s even more formidable in person. He said, “I’m a Muslim; I don’t want it done at all.” I said, “Then I’m not going to do it if he doesn’t want it done.” Waylon said, “Oh, we can handle him.” So that’s how I met Waylon the first time. He liked to come out here and sit in this cabin. He would just get a chair and sit over there and wouldn’t say anything for maybe 45 minutes to an hour. He said he got renewed here. One day he came in here and sat, and it wasn’t the same. Finally, Jessi said, “Waylon, what’s the matter with you?” He said, “I don’t know but something ain’t right.” After awhile he said, “I know what it is. Remember two Christmases ago when [Johnny] Cash took us over to the Holy Land and we were riding out in the desert, and we saw a big light way out in the distance?” Jessi, who is very, very religious, kept saying, “Waylon, that’s the Star in the East.” And Waylon would say, “Yeah. Sure.” But he said he started getting a little spooked because the closer they got, the bigger the light was. “Finally,” he said, “we got up there and it was Bedouin, a shepherd, in a tent watching CNN News on a satellite television.” Then he said to me: “It’s your computer; it doesn’t belong in this cabin. You ought to get it out of here, Will.” BT: No wonder you stay in trouble with some Baptists.
WC: Yeah, there’s a fellow up at the seminary who attacks things I’ve written about baptism. I made the big mistake of baptizing my 6-yearold grandson by sprinkling — which was no offense to me, and it didn’t bother the kid. I knew this was not the “orthodox” way to do it, but my daughter was not involved in any church — whatever church is. She asked me at Christmas if I would christen — I believe that Feature | 35