Singer-songwriter Kate Campbell has played all manner of Memphis churches and concert halls, but the venue she keeps coming back to is the Center For Southern Folklore.

The Center, when it was located on Beale Street, was one of the first places Campbell performed more that 15 years ago when the former history teacher gave up an academic career to pursue songwriting full time.

“The Center is just a really nice place for me,” Campbell says of the nonprofit that, like her songcraft, is dedicated to the preservation of regional history, heritage, and traditions. “It fits what I do. It fits my style of storytelling and my love of the South.”

Campbell will be performing three times at the Center this weekend. Saturday night she will deliver a solo acoustic performance. Then on Sunday afternoon she’ll lead a songwriters’ workshop co-sponsored by the Center and the Memphis Songwriters Association. KateFest, a more intimate, laid-back matinee performance, will follow that.

Born a preacher’s daughter in New Orleans and raised in Sledge, Miss., a half-hour’s drive from Memphis, Campbell has spent most of her life in the South.

“I really like to say I’m a Mid-South girl because I spent most of my life between Nashville, Memphis, via Northern Mississippi, and Birmingham, Ala., says the Nashville resident.

Campbell started writing songs as a little girl and eventually mastered the piano and guitar. Though she always played music, she was on track to be a college history professor before stopping a dissertation short of her Ph.D. in her 30s to become a professional songwriter instead.

“That was hands on,” says Campbell of her first professional gig as a staff songwriter at Fame Music, the publishing house affiliated with the famous Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. “That really taught me a lot about commercial songwriting.”

After a short tutelage at Fame, Campbell began making her own CDs. The occasion for Campbell’s appearances this weekend is the release of her latest album, Save the Day. The release, her 12th since her 1994 debut Songs From the Levee, is, as the troubadour herself admits, “quintessential Kate,” a mix of folk, blues, gospel, and rock with rich detailed, almost novelistic story songs starring such familiar Campbell subjects as Jesus, Elvis, and Henry Ford.

“All of my albums have been somewhat of an organic process but this one truly was,” she says from her Nashville home. “Through the years I’ve sometimes had themes that I’ve started with, even maybe the album title, and written toward thinking about that. This time I didn’t do that. Over the period of about 2 years I just let the songs come. The title cut came in the middle of that process, and by the time I’d felt like I’d written all the songs for the CD they all seemed to collect around it.”

Campbell invited a few friends along to help her flesh out the songs. Onetime Memphis tunesmith Spooner Oldham, a musical partner from Campbell’s Fame days, lends his keyboard talents to “Sorrowfree,” a track inspired by Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Nanci Griffith provides harmony on “Fordlandia,” a recounting of Ford’s real-life Herzog-ian attempt to build a tire factory in the middle of the Amazon. John Prine and Mac McAnally also contribute to tracks.

Kate Campbell CD release party

All events are at the Center for Southern Folklore Hall, 119 S. Main Street. For more information, visit southernfolklore.com or call 901-525-3655.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Tickets: $15 in advance, $18 day of the show, $25 for Golden Circle seats

Kate Campbell Songwriters’ Workshop

When: 2-4 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: General public, $30; Memphis Songwriters Association and CSF members, $25

KateFest

When: 4- 5:30 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: Free to workshop participants; $20 to the general public