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Thursday, January 15, 2004 Books: Hell's belle
By John Ziebell
There's good reason the word "autobiography" strikes fear into the hearts of readers; in the name of celebrity, publishers continue to barrage bookstores with the fantasies and half-baked musings of the least interesting humans among us. Here, then, is your ray of hope for the new year: Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, a fresh, very readable memoir by Nashville singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman. It's no surprise that Chapman can turn out a lyrical literary effort. She has generated somewhere in excess of 250 songs, after all; in addition to her own albums, Chapman's work has been performed by pretty much everybody who's anybody in Nashville and beyond. Rather than being built along a timeline, Chapman's book presents a true songwriters' chronology: a life measured by the music that sprang from it. The narrative is structured around a dozen songs that mark significant personal mileposts for Chapman. This gives us a musical flow chart of her career path, but more importantly she shares insights into the intentions behind the songs and the process of assembling them from the world, detailing not only how Chapman's music has reflected her life, but how the individual elements of the compositions came together. It's a unique approach that comes off very well, mainly because of the author's engaging, always-candid voice. There's nothing harder to explain than the creative process, and Chapman does a remarkable job of representing the sensibility that's essential to making the magic happen: work, more work and a life worth writing about. "I don't have time to imagine anything. That shit happened," Chapman says at one point, responding to a compliment about the inventiveness of her songwriting. Which is the kind of statement you'd expect from the kind of well-bred belle who'd leave Vanderbilt to assault the Nashville music scene with one suitcase, a guitar and an LP of Big Joe Turner's greatest hits. Nashville, through the 1970s and '80s, had all the elements of a fairly exclusive house party. There's a charmingly chaotic feel to life within each of the book's chapters, as the big names come and go, and while the narrative may wander at times, its core focus never shifts. When Chapman explains songwriting she is, of course, explaining something more, and even people who wouldn't recognize a dropped D-string tuning get the point. "Whenever I write something and wonder Where did that come from?" Chapman says, "I often later realize exactly where it came from. And the place is usually very real." We connect when she tells us, for example, about writing "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet" after waking up one morning face-down in a vegetable garden wearing just her underpants. After a few chapters, titles like "Why Can't I Be Like Other Girls" are pretty self-explanatory. It's the song you'd expect from a woman who seriously considered titling a CD "Who in Hell Is This Honky Bitch?," numbered her speedfreak boyfriends and performed a rap version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales when she was asked to make a 20th reunion performance at the private girls' academy she attended. How could a genteel Southern debutante go so wrong? The book provides an insightful and highly entertaining answer: Chapman had to work hard at it, day and night, for years. And that makes for a story that behaves the way a great song should: high speed, low fluff, with something special that resonates long after it's ended. Marshall Chapman St Martin's Press 260 pages |
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