It’s often claimed all American culture stems from Southern culture, with its wide-spreading, moss-dripping branches.

Music thought of as American — jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, rock, R&B, soul, funk, gospel, zydeco and Appalachian folk — either arose directly from or flourished in the South.

Coupled with the South’s wealth of literary riches, as writer and historian Wayne Flynt points out, lies the dichotomy of the arguably most backward area of the country also being its most fertile ground for art.

“There were 14 Southerners who won Pulitzers in literature between 1933 and ’77; that was 40 percent of all the awards given,” said Flynt, professor emeritus in the history department at Auburn University.

“So a region of the country that had one-fourth of the population, and one-third of its poverty, produced 40 percent of its most acclaimed writers. The South had a sort of headlock on that prize,” said Flynt, an Anniston native.

“I’ve long argued that you could not understand Southern history if you did not understand Southern literature.”

One who took that lecture to heart was singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, the Mississippi-born former history student who returned to her earliest love, music, with 1995’s debut disc “Songs From the Levee.” Her compositions, grounded in folk traditions and found on more than a dozen discs since, often derive directly from the literature of Mississippi legends Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, or more contemporary writers such as Alabamians Mark Childress and Fannie Flagg, along with, of course, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“It’s a little bit like a theater reading, except it does involve music. It’s not really like reader’s theater. It’s also not a musical, either. It’s also not me doing my regular show, where I do tell stories, but I sing more songs,” said Campbell, who’s performed several times at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts and more recently in Tuscaloosa at a private event.

“It has that combination of cultural and historical elements, with a very intimate feeling.”

Flynt isn’t sure how to peg it either.

“This is not a lecture, but it’s a lot more than just singing songs. And it’s not storytelling. It has a more deeply rooted literary heritage to it,” he said. “I think it’s a hybrid that nobody else is doing.”

The collaboration evolved from a series of classes the two team-taught at Samford University in Birmingham, where Campbell earned her undergraduate degree. She got her master’s at Auburn, went out west for a while with her husband, then moved back South to Nashville, with an eye to earning a Ph.D in history at Vanderbilt.

“I guess the muse sort of flew over her head and landed on her shoulder,” Flynt said. “She started composing and writing again, but writing in a very different way, after reading a passage from Eudora Welty, or driving along and seeing the sign garden outside of Prattville.”

Campbell landed a writing gig with Muscle Shoals’ FAME Studios about 20 years ago. Encouraged by legends such as Spooner Oldham and David Hood, and by the rising of Shoals-area musicians such as Jason Isbell and the band Drive-by Truckers — led by Hood’s son Patterson, it broke through on “Southern Rock Opera,” built largely around the complexities of “The Southern Thing” — she began to compose “what I really wanted to write about, not what people wanted to hear.”

“And surprisingly, that’s when people started to pay attention,” she said.

What Campbell wanted to write about was the complexity of the South, where “Southern hospitality” stands side by side with blatant racism, where blacks and whites performing music not so long ago had to leave the shared stage for separate buses, separate motels and restaurants.

Mississippi crops up often, as does Alabama, and not just for their euphonic names, in songs such as “Ave Maria Grotto,” “Alabama Department of Corrections Meditation Blues,” “Red Clay After Rain,” “Spoonerville” (a tribute to Oldham), “Montgomery to Mobile” and “Bear It Away.”

It’s not all sunshine and green fields; just as the South bears both vast ignorance and visionary art, Campbell’s music encompasses the dark and the light. Some of her songs, such as “Jesus and Tomatoes Coming Soon,” straddle both in witty, warm and yet pointed observations of religious fervor.

One evening as Flynt was listening to a radio show out of Arkansas, it began playing a song “by this remarkable young folk singer named Kate Campbell, I thought ‘Well, that couldn’t be Katherine.’ But I listened, and I heard her voice, and I thought, ‘Good Lord, that’s marvelous.’ ” In her lyrics, Flynt divined Campbell’s enthrallment with Southern literature and culture. He began playing her music to open his Southern history classes, and he and his wife became fans. Several years back, Flynt and Campbell teamed to teach a series of courses at Samford, leading to the first of the hybrid performance- reading lectures- whatevers.

“In college I was a double major in theater and public speaking, along with history,” Flynt said. “I did dramatic reading in debate tournaments. My wife was a theater major; she’s done readings at our church. I became amazed at how powerful you can be when you take the readings out of their typical blase setting.”

In 2008’s Homecoming weekend at Samford, Flynt and Campbell worked together on the hybrid event — recorded simply, with one microphone, and later released as a CD.

“I didn’t even know they recorded it,” Campbell said. “It was like 9 o’clock in the morning, and I’d opened for John Prine the night before.”

Hearing from the sound technician that he’d kept recordings, Campbell listened, then with Flynt’s input, edited and released the disc.

“So over the last couple or more years, when folks have asked, we’ve done some of these programs,” she said.