Marshall Chapman

Marshall Chapman is an American singer-songwriter-author who was born and raised in Spartanburg, South Carolina. To date she has released two nonfiction books and thirteen critically acclaimed albums, highlighted by the most recent album Blaze of Glory (released May 28, 2013) which is being hailed a musical masterpiece. Her songs have been recorded by everyone from Emmylou Harris and Joe Cocker to Irma Thomas and Jimmy Buffett; the complete list is available at www.tallgirl.com

In 2010, Chapman landed her first movie role, playing Gwyneth Paltrow's road manager in Country Strong. While filming the movie, her musical Good Ol' Girls (adapted from the fiction of Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, featuring songs by Matraca Berg and Marshall) opened off-Broadway. That fall, Chapman simultaneously released a book (They Came to Nashville) and CD (Big Lonesome).

They Came to Nashville was nominated for the 2011 SIBA Book Award for nonfiction. Marshall Chapman knows Nashville. A musician, songwriter, and author with thirteen albums and a bestselling memoir under her belt, Chapman has lived and breathed Music City for over forty years. Her friendships with those who helped make Nashville one of the major forces in American music culture is unsurpassed. And in her new book, They Came to Nashville, the reader is invited to see Marshall Chapman as never before–as music journalist extraordinaire.

In They Came to Nashville, nominated for the 2011 SIBA Book Award for nonfiction, Chapman records the personal stories of musicians shaping the modern history of music in Nashville, from the mouths of the musicians themselves. The trials, tribulations, and evolution of Music City are on display, as she sits down with influential figures like Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, and Miranda Lambert, and a dozen other top names, to record what brought each of them to Nashville and what inspired them to persevere. The book culminates in a hilarious and heroic attempt to find enough free time with Willie Nelson to get a proper interview. Instead, she’s brought along on his raucous 2008 tour, where she winds up onstage in Beaumont, Texas, singing “Good-Hearted Woman” with Willie.

Marshall's first book, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller (St. Martin's Press) was a SIBA bestseller, 2004 SIBA Book Award finalist, and one of three finalists for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. The book is now in its third printing. “Raised a debutante in Spartanburg, South Carolina, singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman became a rocker at a time when women didn’t pick up electric guitars. She is ‘a living example,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘of the triumph of rock and roll over good breeding.’ Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller uses twelve of Chapman’s most resonant songs as launching pads for stories that take us where she’s been and reveal what went through her mind while she was traveling there. From New Year’s Eve in 1978 when Jerry Lee Lewis gave Chapman advice on how to live life to the time her black maid, Cora Jeter, took the seven-year-old to see Elvis, this book looks back on intimate rock-and-roll moments and memories of a South Carolina girlhood.”

Marshall is a contributing editor to Garden & Gun and Nashville Arts Magazine, where she has a monthly column entitled "Beyond Words". She has also written for The Oxford American, Southern Living, W, Performing Songwriter, and The Bob Edwards Show (Sirius/XM). But music, she says, "is my first and last love."