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Marshall Chapman (photo: submitted)
Marshall Chapman is 64.
And she wants us to know that.
Perhaps that’s because she’s among the world’s most vivacious 64-year-olds, and perhaps it’s because she thought her life as a gate-rattling rock ’n’ roller was done when she turned 30 and lost a deal with Epic Records.
The next 10 years were filled with distress and fragility, and then the world just opened up. Or maybe she pried it open with a howl, a crowbar and a melody.
Either way, she has now been in Nashville more than 45 years, and she has become an Americana music mainstay, a hit country songwriter, the author of two books, an actor with credits in a feature film and on the television show “Nashville,” a writer for the musical “Good Ol’ Girls” and an essayist who has written for “The Oxford American,” Sirius/XM radio, “Garden & Gun” magazine and other outlets.
This week, she was formally honored as one of the newest inductees into the Spartanburg Music Trail in her hometown of Spartanburg, S.C., a city that was home to music greats including the Marshall Tucker Band, Hank Garland, Walter Hyatt, David Ball, bluegrass banjo master Don Reno, blues man Pink Anderson and many more. (Ed. note: Columnist/musician Peter Cooper is also from Spartanburg, and he is decidedly not an inductee into the Spartanburg Music Trail. Also, he lost the one Grammy for which he was nominated. Just sayin’, for the record...)
A life in music
Chapman moved to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt in 1967. That’s the same year that the Beatles released a song called “When I’m 64.”
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Now, Chapman is 64. And she wants us to know that. And she wants us to know that being a creative person at 64 is both harder and easier than being 24.
“It’s easier because I am who I am and I have nothing to prove,” she says. “But it’s also harder, because the older you get the more you see the grays in things. Where you might have once written, ‘My baby left me and I’m so blue,’ which is easy, you now might have to write about wondering why your baby left. Wondering why gets harder, but I like the grays. I like grooving in the grays.”
Chapman’s 13th album is the just-released “Blaze of Glory,” and comrades including Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Rodney Crowell have called it her finest work.
She doesn’t disagree.
“Blaze of Glory” is raw and rollicking and intimate, inspired by an Elvis Presley concert she saw as a child, by a life in music and art and by complications of the heart.
“I think my music is more and more revealing, because I’m less and less afraid,” she says.
The album’s title track details her life in music.
“I never intended to make it this far, I never had a fallback plan,” she sings. “I always thought I’d go in a blaze of glory.”
That blaze has roared through Nashville from the early 1970s — when Chapman ran around with Cowboy Jack Clement, Waylon Jennings and other renegades — until today. But its burn is mellower now.
“Now every morning at the break of dawn I brush the sleep out from my eyes,” she sings. “I’ve got to see that sun rise up in a blaze of glory.”
A young woman’s wish to explode onstage has become a 64-year-old woman’s need for something more substantial.
“The thing about the sun rising every morning, that’s all you need at this age,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be 40,000 people screaming for you. Just the fact that the sun has come up, that’s enough.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
If you go
What: Marshall Chapman, “Blaze of Glory” release celebration
Where: Grimey’s, 1604 8th Ave. S.
When: 6 p.m. Wednesday
Cost: No cover charge
What: Marshall Chapman with Will Kimbrough
Where: Bluebird Cafe, 4104 Hillsboro Road
When: 9:30 p.m. Friday
Tickets: $12, available Monday at 8 a.m. via www.bluebirdcafe.com