Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller

"Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller is an inventive and original book from Nashville singer/songwriter Marshall Chapman, who uses twelve of her most resonant songs as entry points to many of her life's adventures. Not a memoir, but a map of the places she has been and what went through her mind as she was traveling there, this book is funny and tender, warm and exuberant." "Raised a debutante in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the daughter of a mill owner, and firmly part of proper society, Chapman became a rocker at a time when women weren't yet picking up electric guitars. She is "a living example," as one reviewer wrote, "of the triumph of rock and roll over good breeding."" "From New Year's Eve in 1978 when Jerry Lee Lewis gave Chapman advice on how to live life ("I mean it's one thing when your mother says, 'Honey, don't you think you'd better slow down?' But when The Killer voices his concern ... ") to the time her black maid, Cora Jeter, took the seven-year-old to see Elvis, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller looks back on the moments when the influences on Chapman's songwriting and psyche were cemented. And it winningly reveals how the creative process comes from life: One of Chapman's favorite songs was written after waking up facedown in her underpants in her front-yard vegetable garden."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.