They Came to Nashville

Ashley Cleveland

176   Ashley Cleveland I first started hearing about Ashley Cleveland in the mid-’80s. Whenever a major talent moves to town, it doesn’t take long for word to get around. So a year or so before we met, I already knew about this woman with the powerful and soulful voice who also wrote songs. Before our interview, I emailed Ashley to see if she remembered when we actually met (and to ask when she moved to Nashville). Here’s what she had to say: “I don’t remember exactly the first time we met. I’m thinking it was either at the Bluebird or the Boardwalk. But I do remember the feeling of the first time we met. I was aware of you because I had read about you in the San Francisco Chronicle and had been struck by the article. Wherever it was, when you came in the door, it was one of my early experiences of encountering someone who was larger than life. I was sure you were at least seven feet tall. You wore a white­ Beefy-T, jeans, and a pissed-off look on your face, and I was sold! I also remember my first experiences hearing you perform, watching you prowl and snarl all over the club stages (enlarging them as you went) and then finishing a song with beautiful, perfect French. I minored in French in my oh-so-brief college foray, so that really got my attention. I moved to Nashville August 1, 1984.” I don’t remember being pissed off, but if it was the early ’80s, I had every reason to be. I’d been touring heavily in late 1979 in support of my third album for Epic. At the dawn of 1980, three things happened within a three-week period that had me reeling: (1) Our equipment was stolen in Cleveland. The headline in the Plain Dealer said, “Rock Group Bemoans Theft of Gear Worth $50,000 Here.” (2) One of the guys in my band committed suicide, hanging himself from a ceiling    Ashley Cleveland   177 light fixture in his father’s living room. (3) I was dropped by my record label (Epic) after three critically acclaimed albums. A sane person might have taken any one of these events as a sign to maybe slow down or take a sabbatical. But no. Within a week I was on a plane to New York, where I signed with a manager who had me back on the road working nonstop, if only to make payments on a recently purchased tour bus. The bus experience alone would generate material for a book, beginning with the opening line: “The two happiest days in a girl’s life are . . . the day she buys her bus and the day she sells it.” That spring—with no record deal—I toured relentlessly. In April Marshall, Ashley Cleveland, and Emmylou Harris sing the national anthem at a Vanderbilt women’s basketball game, March 2, 2003 178   They Came to Nashville alone, we played twenty-eight dates in twenty-two states. By summer, I was an emotional, mental, and physical wreck. Not knowing how to take care of myself, I went home to my family in South Carolina weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. I remember a friend saying, “Chapman , you’re so skinny, you’d have to lie down in the shower to get wet!” While in South Carolina, I was hospitalized to have some thyroid nodules removed. The night before I left for South Carolina, the band and I played our last gig at a Nashville club called J. Austin’s. My most vivid memory from that evening was a fight in the J. Austin’s parking lot, precipitated by my desire to escort the lead guitar player’s girlfriend off the bus. While recuperating at my family’s lake house in North Carolina, I overheard my mother discussing the fight incident with my sister Mary. “Good Lord, Mary, I have never even seen a woman hit another woman. Whoever heard of such a thing?” “Well, you know, Mama, it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Mary replied. At that point, Mother tilted her head thoughtfully to one side. “Well, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a dog eat another dog!” One thing I can say about my family: they can make me laugh when no one else can. As Dolly...