Featured Author:
Jonathon Grayson, MDMore Featured Authors:
Rachel Stolzman Ashley Rhodes-Courter Lynn Kiele Bonasia Jayne Lytel Barrie Wilson Chuck Thompson Julie Fenster Christopher van Tilburg John Byrne Cooke Logan Levkoff Lou Marinoff Carlos Schenck Thomas Armstrong Lisa Robyn Missy Chase Lapine Rosalie Greenberg Jeff Sypeck Geeta Anand Holly H. Hollenbeck Bob Mitchell Michele Borba Susan Shaffer &Linda Gordon Geralyn Lucas Kevin T. Jackson Marshall Chapman Peter Friedman Laura Berman Fortgang John Selby Elaine Neil Orr Pamela Duncan Elizabeth Rosner
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"Rock 'n' roll," wrote music journalist Greil Marcus, "is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation." Rarely does a book capture this beating heart of rock 'n' roll - the sweat, the fire and laughter and hysteria - as does Marshall Chapman's Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller. Containing all the attitude and energy of Chapman's best songs, the book offers insight into the creative process and a narrative as good as any country story, complete with excessive drinking, cheating, and heartache. Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller was also recently nominated for a SEBA 2004 Book Award for nonfiction.
Born
the debutante daughter of a mill owner in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Marshall Chapman rose from a prim Southern upbringing to become
a country and rock songwriter and performer. She has written over 250 songs, released eight critically acclaimed albums, and has opened
for John Prine, Jerry Lee Lewis, and The Ramones in addition to touring extensively on her own. "Before Lucinda, before Shelby, there
was Marshall," writes Oxford American. Funny, wistful, and honest, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller is both a chronicle
of the changing country music industry, from the Nashville of the early '70s, "when the '60s hit the South," to the present, and a reflection
on a career and life lived to the brink. "'Rode Hard and Put Up Wet' was the first song I wrote by myself that felt like I wasn't trying," Chapman
writes. "It just poured out one hungover afternoon in late summer of 1973. I'd woken up around noon facedown in my front yard - which
was a vegetable garden - wearing nothing but my underpants."
Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller is structured around twelve songs (not necessarily the twelve best, Chapman explains, "Just the ones that have the best stories around them"), and details their genesis and personal importance. It finds Chapman at age 50 looking back over a frenetic life of success and tragedy in love and business, and tells it with the refined expression of a veteran lyricist and the facility of the best Southern storytellers. "It's a credit to Marshall Chapman's wit and spirit," writes author Dave Hickey, "that Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller manages to tell the unvarnished truth about writing and playing music while still communicating just how much fun those adventures in the American night can be." And Alice Randall says, "Chapman writes like she lives - with wild grace. This book is as strong and sweet as a julep in July."
-- Marc Bain
