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Rock ‘n’ roller Marshall Chapman triumphs over good breeding

by Jeanne McDonald

There she is—Marshall Chapman, in the flesh, all six feet of her folded into a chair behind a sizable pile of books, surveying the room with blue-gray eyes that (I fantasize) have turned pale from seeing so much of the world and peering so deeply into her own life. Her guitar is stashed by her feet, as if it’s a prosthesis she can’t get too far from. She’s dressed in a white shirt, denim jacket, faded jeans, and scuffed brown boots. Her blonde hair looks as if she’s combed it with her fingers. She’s wearing no makeup and a crooked smile. She’s beautiful, inside and out.

When I spot her on the other side of the room at the ETSU Book Fair, I feel an immediate link to her, not just as a woman or a writer or as a mutual friend of novelist Lee Smith, but as some sort of fundamental connection. She’s nice, real nice. She’s famous in the arena of country/rock and roll music—a definite legend, but in five minutes we’re friends: I am telling her a story about my ex-husband, and she’s telling me one about her mother. I feel deprived when another fan comes up to talk to her.

Marshall Chapman never spoke a word until she was three years old. The story she tells in her recently published memoir (Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, St. Martin’s Press, $24.95) is that the night after Christmas, 1951, her sister was playing “Waltz of the Flowers” on her 78-rpm record player, and Marshall marched downstairs in her footed pajamas, lifted the needle off the record, and complained, “How do you expect anybody to get any sleep around here with all this racket going on!?” I have a notion that during those three silent years, she was thinking the whole time, maybe composing lyrics in her head and observing the world with her cool, detached vigilance.

I’d seen Marshall Chapman before, in a performance with Lee Smith and Matracea Berg at the Southern Festival of Books in 2001. On stage she presented Lee with an enviable gift, her Elvis jacket, the touching transfer of which, I believed, had to be based on abiding affection. That night I went to a Nashville record store and bought her CD, Love Slave, and I got hooked on Marshall Chapman.

Marshall’s songs are ballads drawn from her experiences, chance encounters, lost love, dreams, death. In her book she chronicles songs alongside what was happening in her life when she wrote them. And when she sings them in her low, measured drawl, you know it’s not just any story you’re hearing, it’s something real that’s actually happened to Marshall Chapman. Each song is an epiphany, no matter how small—as small, for instance, as an encounter with a round-faced baby in a super market.

“I was not just wild,” Marshall remarks, grinning, “I was deeply wild.” In fact, her memoir illustrates that she redefined “wild” during her early years on the music scene. It all started in 1956—this ride toward celebrity with all its psychodynamic nicks and bumps—when her family’s black maid, Cora Jeter, took her to see Elvis Presley at the Carolina Theater in Spartanburg, S.C., and 7-year-old Marshall was instantly sucked into life in the rock and roll lane. She tells, confesses, it all in the memoir—the victories, failures, drugs, booze, disappointment, heartbreak, and trips “to the desert.” Sometimes she changes names to protect the not-so-innocent, but she literally bares all (check out the cover photo). A critic’s blurb calls her career “the triumph of rock and roll over good breeding,” but the author’s anecdotes about celebrities alone are worth the price of the book—stories about Jimmy Buffett (whom she calls “one-third musician, one-third P. T. Barnum, and one-third Huey Long”), Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis (who, the first time he met her, said, “Don’t you burn out now, hon’.”) Joe Cocker, Emmylou, Willie; you name them, Marshall has a story about them.

Marshall has banished past demons through AA and her faith in God, but the songs and the gigs keep coming, many of them now to promote her book. Don Williams, the local writer (not the country singer), tells me that every year, when his large extended family celebrates the New Year at his sister’s house in Nashville, “at the end of the party, usually about three in the morning, we all stand and, arm in arm, sing Marshall Chapman’s song, “I’m Looking for the Times to Get Better.” Marshall Chapman never did burn out, but she’s still got a good fire going, keeping us warm with her words and music.

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse