Marshall Chapman

Marshall Chapman emerged within Nashville’s outlaw-country surge of the early 1970s as both songwriter and solo performer, blending country-rock with broader stylistic impulses. Her 1977 debut, Me, I’m Feelin’ Free on Epic Records, yielded the single “Somewhere South of Macon,” and she later partnered with Jimmy Buffett on his 1985 album Last Mango in Paris while also joining his road ensemble. That same year Sawyer Brown reached the country charts with her composition “Betty’s Bein’ Bad.” Artists such as Conway Twitty and Joe Cocker recorded her material, yet Chapman kept issuing her own records; the seventh, It’s About Time, appeared on Buffett’s Margaritaville imprint in 1995. She published a memoir in 2003, followed by her tenth studio album, Big Lonesome, in 2011, and remained active into her seventies with the 2020 covers collection Songs I Can’t Live Without.

Born into the prominent Chapman family of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, whose cotton mill anchored the local economy, she balanced early passions for athletics and music. In 1957 an outing to the Carolina Theatre to see Elvis Presley proved decisive. She finished second in the South Carolina Junior Girls’ golf tournament and once scored more points than the entire opposing squad in a high-school basketball contest. Entering Vanderbilt University in 1967 to study French, she found herself drawn instead to the city’s burgeoning music community, sharing stages at the Exit/In with Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Billy Joe Shaver before graduating in 1971.

Me, I’m Feelin’ Free arrived in 1977, coinciding with the Marshall Tucker Band’s international breakthrough. Epic followed with Jaded Virgin in 1978 and Marshall in 1979; she then moved to Rounder Records, which issued her fourth album, Take It on Home, in 1982. During this period Joe Cocker, Emmylou Harris, and Olivia Newton-John recorded her songs. After relocating temporarily to Key West with a partner, she reconnected with Buffett, whom she had first met a decade earlier in Texas; their subsequent collaborations supplied material for Last Mango in Paris. Sawyer Brown’s Billboard Top Five country success with “Betty’s Bein’ Bad” occurred the same year. Returning to Nashville, Chapman founded Tall Girl Records—named for her height—and inaugurated the label with 1987’s Dirty Linen while touring as guitarist and backing vocalist in Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. By then John Hiatt and Tanya Tucker had also cut her compositions.

Inside Job appeared on Tall Girl in 1991, and Margaritaville released her first live album, It’s About Time, in 1995; the set documented a performance at the Tennessee State Prison for Women shortly before Halloween 1993. Love Slave followed in 1996 on the joint Tall Girl/Margaritaville imprint. After a hiatus she returned in 2003 with an album paired to her memoir Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, issued by St. Martin’s Press, and issued another live recording, Live! At the Bitter End, in 2004. Mellowicious! came out in April 2006. She next devoted time to They Came to Nashville, published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2010, which featured interviews with Kristofferson, Harris, and Miranda Lambert. Big Lonesome, released the following year, was dedicated to her late friend and former bandmate Tim Krekel, who died of cancer in 2009. Co-produced once more by Michael Utley, the 2013 album Blaze of Glory featured her longstanding backing group. Songs I Can’t Live Without, her twelfth studio release, arrived in 2020 as a covers project spotlighting material by Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and Carole King.