Spartanburg native Marshall Chapman returns home with friends, stories and songs

By DAN ARMONAITIS

When Nashville-based singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman returns to her native Spartanburg for a performance on Wednesday, Oct. 30 at the Chapman Cultural Center, she’ll be joined on stage by fellow singer-songwriter Matraca Berg and a pair of New York Times best-selling authors, Jill McCorkle and Lee Smith.

The collaboration, Chapman said, “feels as natural as breathing. I have always grooved in that place where songs and literature come together.”

Chapman, whose songs have been recorded by everyone from Emmylou Harris and Joe Cocker to Irma Thomas and Jimmy Buffett, added that she’s very much loooking forward to bringing the unique show to the Hub City and that the audience can “expect the unexpected.”

“It’s always special whenever I perform in my hometown,” she said, “but to bring Matraca, Lee and Jill — plus their husbands — makes it even more special. …. Matraca and I will be singing songs that tie in with Lee’s and Jill’s readings, so the audience can expect four Southern women sitting around singing and talking and reading and just generally carrying on.”

The benefit concert is designed to raise funds for the operating endowment that supports the Chapman Cultural Center’s long-term sustainability and is part of the Spartanburg County Foundation’s Endowment Challenge. The hour-long performance will be followed by a book and CD signing with the performers.

“The thing I love about the Chapman Cultural Center is that it’s open and available to the entire community. It’s inclusive,” said Chapman, whose philanthropic family gave the venue its name. “And they have some great programs going on, especially for children, that are free and expose them to the arts.”

Chapman, Berg, McCorkle and Smith have performed together on the rare occasions their schedules permit since 1998 when they began work on “Good Ol’ Girls,” a musical that premiered in Chapel Hill, N.C., and eventually opened off-Broadway in 2010.

“Matraca Berg called me out of the blue saying she wanted to do a musical, and she wanted to do it with me and with Lee Smith,” Chapman said. “Matraca didn’t know Lee, but she knew I did. Lee and I used to run together with a crowd back in the 1970s when (Smith) and her first husband lived in Nashville. Anyway, Matraca asked me to call Lee to see if she was interested, so I did.”

Chapman said that Lee, who was in the middle of writing a novel at the time, was initially hesitant.

“I mean, when I told her Matraca Berg wanted to do a musical and she wanted to do it with me and she wanted to do it with her, Lee just said, ‘… oh.’ And this was followed by silence,” Chapman explained. “But then she called me back later that evening all excited saying she was in … and that she’d run into a director, Paul Ferguson, at a cocktail party in Chapel Hill and he was in, too. ‘And, oh, by the way, let’s bring in Jill McCorkle.'”

At the time, Chapman barely knew Berg, so her phone call took her by surprise.

“I was a little intimidated by her, as she was coming off six No. 1 country songs,” Chapman recalled. “Of course, Matraca later confessed she was intimidated by me because of my badass rock ‘n’ roll reputation.”

The collaboration works, Chapman said, because of the unspoken understandings that are already in place from the four of them all being southern women.

“We all know that ‘double-wide’ is a noun rather an adjective,” Chapman said with a laugh. “But going deeper … the reason Matraca wanted me to contact Lee is because Lee is Matraca’s favorite writer. Lee grew up in the coal-mining mountains around Grundy, Virginia, and Matraca’s mother’s people are from eastern Kentucky.

“So, Lee and Matraca both have that Appalachian sensibility. And Lee brought Jill in because she thought Jill’s fiction would gel with my songs since Jill and I both have that Carolina, beach-loving sensibility.”

While growing up in Spartanburg’s Converse Heights neighborhood, Chapman began developing her appreciation for musical styles that were quite different from the symphony-type music her parents introduced to her.

“I have often described my music as R&W — rhythm and words,” Chapman said. “I feel like Spartanburg gave me the rhythm … whereas Nashville gave me the words. Something about growing up in the Jim Crow South. Let’s face it, I grew up around black people. They lived in our house with us. And, in our house on Connecticut Avenue, I spent a lot of time in the basement with our maid, Lula Mae Moore.

“She’d be ironing our clothes while listening to this radio that was always tuned to a black station that played rhythm & blues. So while she’d be ironing, I’d be gyrating around to Big Joe Turner singing ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll.’ So, yes, I found my rhythm down in that basement.”

Songwriting, meanwhile, took hold of Chapman soon after she enrolled in Nashville’s Vanderbilt University in 1967.

“I was running into people like Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Shaver, Willie Nelson (and) Marijohn Wilkin … and the songs they were writing just knocked my socks off, so I started writing songs,” Chapman said. “And the first song I ever wrote was called ‘A Woman’s Heart (is a Handy Place to Be).’ And when I wrote the line, ‘I just wish the heart that’s broken now was not a part of me,’ a voice inside said, ‘Marshall, honey, you can do this!'”

Throughout her career, Chapman has released more than a dozen critically-acclaimed albums, including her most recent roots music masterpiece, “Blaze of Glory,” which was released in 2013.

Her recording career began in the 1970s with a string of rock-oriented albums for Epic Records, highlighted by the Al Kooper-produced “Jaded Virgin,” which was voted 1978’s Record of the Year by Stereo Review.

Six years ago, Chapman was inducted as a member of the Spartanburg Music Trail. The sign recognizing her achievements, which can be found on a corner just across the street from the Chapman Cultural Center, is backed on the other side by the Sparkletones, the legendary Spartanburg-based rock ‘n’ roll group whose ABC-Paramount Records single, “Black Slacks,” was a massive hit in 1957, the same year Chapman turned eight years old.

“Being inducted into the Spartanburg Music Trail was a career highlight, for sure — right up there with the first time I played the (Grand Ole) Opry,” Chapman said. “But the fact that I was inducted with the Sparkletones made it even more special. I remember seeing those guys on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ … and, well, I’ve always been a rocker at heart, so it felt good and special to me to be inducted with them.”

Chapman said Peter Cooper’s 1997 book, “Hub City Music Makers: One Southern Town’s Popular Music Legacy,” published by Hub City Press, is a great introduction for anyone wanting to learn more about the many influential musicians whose roots can be traced back to Spartanburg.

“Ironically, I didn’t know about Spartanburg’s rich musical legacy while growing up there,” she said. “I had to go to Nashville to find out how cool Spartanburg really was. … It’s amazing how musicians all over know about Spartanburg. Just recently, I was working in a studio here in Nashville, and when the engineer found out I was from Spartanburg, the session literally came to a halt. ‘Oh my God,’ he said, ‘Ira Tucker is the greatest singer who ever lived!'”

Despite the artistic success of 2013’s “Blaze of Glory,” Chapman said she considered retiring from music not long after its release.

“In the winter of 2014-2015, I experienced a lot of trauma that had me thinking I had to give up music,” she said. “Things got so bad, I even considered moving back to Spartanburg. But, now, it’s five years later … and time has a way of changing everything.”

Chapman, who has also gotten back into writing songs of her own, is set to release a new album of covers, “Songs I Can’t Live Without,” in April 2020.

“I always wanted to record an album of songs I didn’t write — songs written by other songwriters … songs that have kept my soul alive over the years,” Chapman said. “‘Songs I Can’t Live Without’ is that album … I’m pretty excited about it.”