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Interview and performance: Marshall Chapman discusses They Came to Nashville

Special Program

October 30, 2010
Marshall Chapman, daughter of a South Carolina textile mill owner, arrived in Nashville in the fall of 1967 to attend Vanderbilt University. The city and its music scene had a great impact on Chapman's life; conversely, it can be said, Chapman continues to impact her chosen hometown.

Chapman's second book, They Came to Nashville, features the music veteran interviewing fifteen singer-songwriters whose lives also were changed by Music City U.S.A. To celebrate the launch of the book, which was published by the Country Music Foundation Press and Vanderbilt University Press, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum hosted a program on October 30 honoring Chapman.

Video Placeholder for: Marshall Chapman Interview and Performance: They Came To Nashville   Watch video from this program.

During the ninety-minute program, Chapman discussed her book and her career with the museum's Jay Orr; she also performed songs from her new album, Big Lonesome, as well as "Betty's Bein' Bad," a 1985 country hit for Sawyer Brown, written by Chapman.

Born and raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Chapman grew up in upper-class society; her parents preferred classical music and rarely listened to country or rock & roll. "I came from one of those well-to-do southern families," Chapman said. "For the longest time, I didn't want anybody to know that. I wanted people to think my father was a sharecropper from Dyess, Arkansas, like Rosanne [Cash]."

In the program, Orr juxtaposed photographs of Chapman at a 1969 debutante ball in Spartanburg with those of her rocking onstage in 1979. "I dare you to go from making your debut to that," Chapman said to howls of laughter from the crowd. "I did it in a fairly short span of time, too."

At age sixteen at a textile convention in Florida, Chapman met Walter Forbes, a traditional music performer who recorded two albums for RCA Records. Forbes recommended Vanderbilt University to Chapman because of her interest in becoming a musician.

"It printed in my soul that, by God, I was going to Vanderbilt," she said. "Most families would think that was a good move. But not my family. They wanted me to go to Hollins or Sweetbriar-I call them 'lady factories'-because they were small, private women's colleges."

She wrote her first song in 1973 and released her first album, Me, I'm Feeling Free, on Epic Records in 1977. Her 1978 album, Jaded Virgin, was produced by Al Kooper. Big Lonesome, already garnering critical acclaim, is Chapman's twelfth album.

Chapman also has had songs cut by many other artists, including Jimmy Buffett, Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Irma Thomas, and Conway Twitty. Her first book, the memoir Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, was published in 2003. She and friend Matraca Berg co-wrote fourteen songs for an Off Boadway musical, Good Ol' Girls, based on the stories of Jill McCorkle and Lee Smith. Chapman also has an acting role in the new Hollywood movie Country Strong, in which she plays the road manager for the film's co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Near the start of the interview, Chapman cited her agent's initial reaction to a manuscript featuring several of her early interviews with songwriters. "This is fine and well," the agent said, "but I've never heard of any of these people. You're going to have to write about someone people have heard of!"

Chapman added several famous artists she knows personally, including Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson. "I learned very quickly that it is much more difficult to land an interview with an American icon," Chapman said, "than it is with one of your best friends down the street."

To reach Nelson, Chapman circumvented his publicist, who had said Nelson wasn't doing interviews. Instead, she contacted Mickey Raphael, Nelson's longtime harmonica player. Raphael passed along Nelson's e-mail. Eventually, Nelson invited Chapman to join him on his tour bus on the road.

"I was on the bus for four days," Chapman said, then referenced Nelson's well-established love for smoking marijuana. "So if I seem a little spaced out up here today, that's why." She encouraged the audience to read the book for the rest of her story of going on the road with Willie.

They Came to Nashville sweeps from seventy-seven-year-old Nelson to twenty-six-year-old Miranda Lambert. Chapman included the latter after being asked to profile Lambert for Garden & Gun, a magazine for which Chapman is a contributing editor. "I thought I probably should have some people in there that my nieces have heard of," Chapman explained. "I wanted it to be diverse."

Orr also had Chapman read from the introduction to her Emmylou Harris interview. The story started at a party that, besides Chapman and Harris, included Asleep at the Wheel leader Ray Benson, Guy and Susanna Clark, Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tyson, and Jerry Jeff Walker. It culminated in Chapman and Tyson being searched by police as they leaned against a "mobile breathalyzer unit," as Chapman wrote of it.

Chapman also told a few "only in Nashville" stories related in her book, such as singer-songwriter Gary Nicholson going to buy a king-sized mattress and ending up writing songs with veteran songwriter Max D. Barnes, and singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman taking a French photographer to a Cracker Barrel restaurant to meet Chet Atkins, only to find disco queen Donna Summer walking out as they were going in, and rocker Leon Russell sitting two tables from Atkins. "Those kinds of things don't happen at a Cracker Barrel in Des Moines," Chapman said.

The book also recounts several hardship cases of artists arriving in dire circumstances only to go on to greater fortune. Emmylou Harris worked in a downtown gay bar while nursing her first child and living on food stamps; Rodney Crowell spent his first night in town sleeping on a picnic table near Percy Priest Lake, using his guitar and its case as a pillow; John Hiatt drove from Indianapolis in a 1963 Corvair without a floorboard and spent his inaugural evening underneath a picnic table in Centennial Park. "John told me they 'fred-flinstoned' it to Nashville," Chapman said. "I'd never heard 'Fred Flinstone' used as a verb."

Chapman also talked of her new album, Big Lonesome, and of the influence of the late Tim Krekel, a longtime collaborator who died in 2009 in his home of Louisville, Kentucky. Chapman had planned to retire from music and focus on writing, until she and Krekel decided to make another album together.

"He was my best friend, and we'd written several songs together," she recalled. "We thought it would be better if we pooled our resources together, so we did. But then he found out he had cancer, and he went very quickly." Chapman finished the album and dedicated it to Krekel.

Chapman ended with another story involving Willie Nelson. After a concert in Beaumont, Texas, Nelson got on his bus and, with his sister Bobbie on a portable Casio keyboard, played old jazz, country, and gospel tunes as they rolled toward Austin.

"It was just one of those moments," she said before closing with a song, "Riding with Willie," from Big Lonesome that draws on the experience. "I felt like I was witnessing something very sacred, and I was."

-Michael McCall