Murphy Campbell sits in a Greensboro coffeehouse, sips herbal iced tea, and laughs knowingly at a question about her Instagram handle, @murphydoesnotmatter.
Yeah, she explains with a grin, she created the account when she was 14, trying to be edgy and self-deprecating, hoping to fit in at Weaver Academy, Greensboro’s arts magnet high school.
She scrolls through her phone and finds a picture of herself from those days. Dark clothes and lots of eye make-up.
Now on the eve of her 20th birthday, she has ditched the somber look, and she favors high-neck, vintage clothes that hark to the era of her art. She carries herself with the confidence of who she is: a youthful force on the old-timey music scene.
So much has happened in the last year.
Last September, she turned loose her first recordings, a self-titled, four-track, extended-play release featuring well-known area musicians.
In April, she was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine after she kicked up a social media fuss about her voice and music being impersonated, poorly, by AI robots on major streaming services.
In May, the real Murphy finished her first full-length album, Revenant, based on newly-discovered ballads sung by her ancestors and others in the North Carolina mountains. The album and an accompanying documentary — shot by the same team that did My Music with Rhiannon Giddens for PBS in 2023 — are expected to debut soon.
The double-barreled project landed her on the cover of Down the Road, an annual journal for lovers of Western North Carolina music.
The same month, she climbed on stage at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, Va., as a guest on WFDD-FM’s The Martha Bassett Show, a highly acclaimed roots music show with a worldwide following on YouTube.
The gigs just kept on coming.
Early this month, she will perform at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Mill Spring, a gathering headlined by The Avett Brothers, Del McCoury Band and banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck.
Midmonth, she will play for the first time at the N.C. Folk Festival in Greensboro, a few miles from her home in the northwest corner of Guilford County.
She will appear — as the last act, on the last day — in the Jan Van Dyke Performance Space, a cozy cavern in the Greensboro Cultural Center.
She asked the organizers for a slot because she believes that more local artists should be included in the festival.
Murphy has never been one to shy away from what she wants.
As a grade-schooler, she changed her name after learning that her mother almost named her for a relative who died after being attacked by a pet spider monkey.
Undeterred by the monkey-borne legacy, the youngster announced that henceforth she would be known as Murphy.
“I just resonated with that,” she says.
A few years later, she moseyed into her older brother’s room — he’d just left for college — picked up his banjo and started noodling. She was inspired to do more after visiting her mother’s family in mountainous Bakersville, where she saw an older woman playing a banjo on the street.
“I’d never seen a woman playing clawhammer,” she says, referring to a technique of picking. “I really wanted to do that.”
Murphy taught herself clawhammer and became a regular at rural house jams and flat-footing meet-ups in North Carolina and Virginia, where people gathered to pick, stomp and trill the night away.
She had found her music and her people in a world very different from what she encountered in school, where she studied recording engineering.
“I got so sick of the concept of digital media and digital recording, how easy it is to alter it,” she says. “It just felt so disingenuous in a lot of ways . . . how much we lie to people’s ears. You can’t do that with old-timey music. It is what it is.”
To get herself through school days, she clamped on headphones as big as biscuits and listened to recordings of Walkertown banjoist and guitarist Riley Baugus, whose picking was featured in Cold Mountain, a 2003 movie based on Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel set in North Carolina.
Later, a mutual friend introduced her to the burly, bearded Baugus, who favors bib overalls.
“I told him, ‘You’re like my Taylor Swift,’” she says, laughing. “He references that a lot.”
Baugus and his longtime friend, Stokes County singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett, took the youngster under their wings.
“Without them, nothing I’ve done in this past year would have happened,” she says.
Dossett and Baugus encouraged Murphy to run with her latest project, which she stumbled upon a year ago. As Murphy tells it, she was at home, celebrating her birthday in her own way — by taking a hike then reading a PDF of southern Appalachian ballads collected more than a century ago.
The author, an English folklorist named Cecil Sharp, scoured the mountains from 1916 to 1918, collecting ballads that he cataloged by date. For fun, Murphy turned to her birthdate in 1918 to see what Sharp had unearthed that day.
She was shocked to see that he had harvested songs from Mitchell County, some coming from her kin four or five generations back. One distant relative, Julie Boone, contributed 40 ballads.
Murphy’s creative senses tingled.
What if she resurrected some of those long-forgotten ballads, many of which were bluesy tunes passed along by formerly enslaved people in the community known locally as Egypt Town.
A week later, Murphy drove to her maternal great-grandparents’ graves, sat on their plots and pondered what to do next. They had been part of a gospel quartet, and Murphy thought about recording in their spiritual home, Rebels Creek Baptist Church, but the church had been damaged by Hurricane Helene’s flooding.
A nearby house of worship, Kona Church, was high and dry, however. Murphy decided that could work.
On the drive home, a word came to her: revenant.
She swears over her herbal iced tea that she didn’t know what “revenant” meant. She looked it up when she got home; it’s a ghost who comes back to deliver a warning to the living.
Murphy took that to mean that she’d better high tail it to a microphone and record the ballads once sung by Julie Boone and her contemporaries.
“This is for Julie,” she says. “She, ultimately, is the revenant.”
A few phone calls later, Murphy secured Kona Church.
After being rejected by potential investors, who balked at recording in an old church with no acoustic updates, Murphy launched a Kickstarter campaign. She asked for $15,000. She got $30,000.
She drafted five guys — four musicians and a sound engineer who knows his way around traditional music — to help her record. Then she rented an Airbnb near Kona Church and cooked for everyone for a week, until the project was done.
Experienced filmmakers Will and Deni McIntyre, of Hendersonville, chronicled the album-making. Murphy says the plan is to trickle out singles this fall. The full album and doc will be released in tandem, she says, hopefully before she leaves for a European tour in the spring.
She’s not sure yet which recording label will handle the album, but she promises it’ll be an outfit dedicated to preserving of old music.
The documentary distributor? That’s undecided, too.
What about the Instagram handle? Does she plan to keep that?
Definitely, she says, adding that it’s not self-deprecating any more; it’s ironic.
“I know I’m doing things that do matter,” she says. OH
Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.
Galas, Honeycrisps and Ginger Golds. Red and Golden Delicious. Cortlands and Crispins. Jonagolds. 
