Features | Chapter 16

Kindred Souls of Knoxville

Singer-songwriter-poet-playwright R.B. Morris orbits in the literary gravity of James Agee and their shared city

By Michael Ray Taylor | October 21, 2009

R.B. Morris recently received a phone call from his longtime friend and sometime touring partner, the legendary folk singer Steve Earle. Both have published books of poetry as well as music, and both share a deep interest in the writer James Agee. Earle explained that he had been asked to write a forward for a new edition of A Death in Family, Agee’s Pulitzer-winning novel based on his own boyhood in the Ft. Sanders section of Knoxville, the place—not coincidentally—where Morris grew up.

Hello, Legendary Songwriter

Marshall Chapman talks with Chapter 16 about her new book, her new record, and her gig with Garden & Gun

By Paul McCoy | October 9, 2009

Marshall Chapman is one of Nashville’s most loved and revered singer-songwriters. To date she has released ten critically acclaimed albums and has written songs for a laundry list of country and rock superstars, including Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Wynonna, Joe Cocker, Jimmy Buffett, Crystal Gayle, and Ronnie Milsap, among many others. Her first book, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller was published in 2003 and was a finalist for both the 2004 SEBA Book Awards and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Her next book, They Came to Nashville, will be released by Vanderbilt University Press in spring 2010.

Book Excerpt: They Came to Nashville

Emmylou Harris tells Marshall Chapman about moving to Nashville in a flesh-colored Ford with a baby bed tied to the roof

By Marshall Chapman | October 7, 2009

My earliest memories of Emmylou are sketchy at best. Let’s see. At one point―it may have been 1972―Emmy was waiting tables at a Polynesian restaurant out on White Bridge Road at about the same time that Rodney Crowell and I were working at T.G.I. Friday’s. I can’t remember if I met Emmylou then or not. But I distinctly remember the first time I heard her singing voice.

Reasons for and Advantages of Fiction

Former Bredesen speechwriter Lydia Peelle discusses her debut story collection—and the pleasure, and usefulness, of writing what you don’t know

By Fernanda Moore | October 7, 2009

It’s impossible to tell from reading her debut story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, that Lydia Peelle isn’t a native Tennessean. Chapter 16 investigates how a born-and-bred New Englander—a woman who grew up in Massachusetts, went to boarding school in New Hampshire and to college at Amherst—could write a collection of stories that places her firmly among this generation’s finest Southern writers.

After Memphis

Journalist Clay Risen looks at the legacy of King assassination, then and now

By Maria Browning | October 6, 2009

Clay Risen‘s A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination offers a detailed examination of the riots that ravaged U.S. cities after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in April 1968. Drawing on a rich array of sources, including firsthand recollections, Risen depicts a country that was not united in mourning, but divided by rage and fear.

I Gotta Sing!

By Alice Faye Duncan
WaterBrook
40 pages
$14.99

“A whole barnyard makes noise ‘in the Spirit of joy’ throughout this raucous picture book, a sweetly heartwarming sing-along by Duncan. Kellam conveys comfort and happiness as the loved ones reflect sunny enthusiasm in this gladdening rendition of the Black American religious folk song ‘I’m Goin’a Sing When the Spirit Says Sing.’”

~Publishers Weekly