They Came to Nashville

Foreword

    vii Foreword Anyone who has ever seen her on stage knows that Marshall Chapman is a force of nature. But then anyone who has ever read her on the page can attest to the same force of impact. There are differences , to be sure, but the one element that ties the two experiences together is Marshall herself. She follows the imperative that Ray Charles and Lowman Pauling laid down musically, Tell the truth. This carries with it all kinds of potential for squirm and discomfiture, but her truth is neither cruel nor sentimental—I think “quirky” might be the best way of describing it—it’s a truth that links passion and whimsicality in a way that few artists I can think of, musical or otherwise, have yet to assay. Like Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, Marshall’s memoir of song, They Came to Nashville is a tribute to the virtues of digression and­ divagation—and I don’t mean that as any kind of a backhanded compliment . Sometimes—maybe most of the time—the best way to get to a place, the best way to get at complex truths, is not by a straight line but by recognizing, by appreciating all the forks in the road along the way. If Marshall didn’t follow the dictates of her imagination, for all we know she might have stayed in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where, it’s true, she did get to see Elvis Presley perform sitting in the “colored” section of the Carolina Theatre with her family’s maid, Cora, when she was just seven. It was a formative experience. But so was nearly everything else. “Making love for the first time (first orgasm, you name it),” as she said in one interview. Hearing Willie Nelson for the first time. Writing her first song. Writing her latest song. Writing her first book. Acting in her first movie. And so on. The wonderful thing about Marshall is how viii   They Came to Nashville welcoming of each experience she is—in all of its serendipitous complications , all of its multifarious possibilities—and how eager, and scrupulous , she is to get on with the business of communicating it. In this book she encourages others to embrace a similar breadth, a similar randomness , in the questions she asks, in her receptivity to the answers, in her explicit complicity with her interview subjects. She’s even got me doing it. When was the first time I came to Nashville? Or more to the point, how did the two of us ever come to meet? It wasn’t through Lee Smith, though it could have been, since Lee is everyone’s soul mate, and the musical Good Ol’ Girls, a collaboration between Lee and Marshall, the novelist Jill McCorkle, and songwriter Matraca Berg, is yet another of Marshall’s remarkable collective enterprises. Marshall at one point was holding out for the likelihood of a long-ago dinner party for Emmylou Harris at Chuck and Beth Flood’s (see page 60)—but that wasn’t it either. Different dinner parties. I cling to the almost certainly manufactured memory of meeting her in the parking lot at Maude’s—with, somehow, both Phil Walden and Pete Drake in the picture. Doubtful. We might just as well settle on Jack Clement, whose antic spirit deserves a memoir of its own, something Jack, a visitor from Alpha Centauri , has been promising for years. The point is, it doesn’t matter. Like everyone in this book, somehow or other we got there. And the getting there—and the stories about getting there—is all that matters. Reading They Came to Nashville can set off that kind of thinking in anyone’s mind. It’s a form of free association that, as anyone who has ever tried to marshal their thoughts knows (sorry), doesn’t necessarily come easy—and it certainly isn’t free. Marshall’s lifetime of incidental adventure, both on and off the stage, can be instructive—but more to the point, it can be thought- and, more important, feeling-provoking, as every subject of Marshall’s scrutiny, from longtime Love Slave (Marshall ’s band) and Straitjacket (his own) Eddie Angel to Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson, discovers. You’ll never get such a skewed and true perspective on the odd turns that life can take as you will from these free-flowing explorations. And yet at the heart of it all is just that, Marshall’s heartfelt dedication and devotion...