Nashville Chrome

Nashville Chrome is a 2010 novel by Rick Bass based on the story of the Arkansas country music group the Browns. The book examines the lives of Maxine, her brother Jim Ed, and her sister Bonnie, with Bass mostly focusing on Maxine, the eldest of the Browns, and her struggles following the group’s breakup in 1967. Although it is fiction, the novel is mostly true to the historical record and echoes Maxine’s 2005 memoir, Looking Back to See. The novel received positive reviews.

Nashville Chrome, Rick Bass’s twenty-fifth book, sets much of its action in the natural world of mid-twentieth-century Arkansas. Bass—who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, often focusing on environmental issues—spent a considerable amount of time in Arkansas before starting Nashville Chrome, and story of the Browns appealed to him. He said in an interview, “They were pioneers of the crossover business model in music, the first group to have #1 hits on both the country and pop charts.” He noted that their success lay in their “haunting family harmony, a tempered harmony that many tried to emulate but could not; only their family members could match it.”

In Nashville Chrome, Bass tells the story of the Browns in straight-forward, uncluttered prose. He takes a chronological approach, although he flashes forward and back in time. The novel begins with the humble, working-class origins of the Browns, who lived in the Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) area before Maxine and her siblings started their music career, one based on a quality of singing that Bass calls “the gift.”

The early setting for the novel is Depression-era Arkansas, in a rural part of the South much like where musicians such as Johnny Cash grew up. But Bass shows that the Browns’ young lives were especially difficult. Their father lost a leg in a logging accident, and he had a drinking problem throughout his life. He was also unfaithful to his wife, who ran a diner/store that burned down multiple times. The novel’s second chapter, “The Bridge,” recounts the Browns’ father, Floyd, foolishly trying to drive his car across a flooded road. The family, luckily, is saved from drowning by a Good Samaritan who pulls them out of danger.

The novel has a melancholy tone, emphasizing the contingency of life, complicated human relationships, and the fleeting, frustrating nature of fame. In her old age, Maxine is often depressed, second-guessing her life choices—such as her troubled marriage—and longing for the days when her family were chart-toppers. The Browns were a successful group, but Bass contrasts their early success with the much longer period in their lives when they were not famous or even working in the music industry.

Jim Ed was the first person to play on radio and TV before enlisting Maxine and later Bonnie. The Browns went on to record a string of hit songs in the 1950s and 1960s, including “Looking Back to See” (written by Maxine) and their cover of the French song “The Three Bells.” As Bass shows, despite their success, the Browns were mismanaged by their conniving and predatory manager, Fabor Robison. Robison is the villain of the novel, a sexual deviant and a man who signs the Browns to an exploitative contract early in their career. He pays them little in the way of living expenses and denies them royalties. “He had taken their power,” Bass writes, “had stolen their magic as surely as if capturing three fireflies in a glass bottle.”

The Browns, however, were not alone in being tricked. Maxine and her siblings were close to Jim Reeves, who had signed a contract with Robison that made Robison rich while keeping Reeves relentlessly touring and short of money. As Bass shows, the story of Reeves and the Browns—at least from a financial point of view—is a cautionary tale.

Even so, the Browns are depicted as a family that loves life on the road, where they meet established and upcoming stars such as Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Bass writes of Elvis’s relationship with Bonnie as a serious romance filled with pastoral imagery. Jim Reeves, too, becomes a friend, although his death in a plane crash in 1964 only adds to the novel’s melancholy.

By the mid-1960s, the music industry was changing dramatically, with the Beatles (who, Bass notes, met the Browns and admired them) shifting pop music away from standards and covers to original songs with a rocking backbeat. The Browns continued to have hits until they parted ways, but as early as 1962, Bass writes, they were “running out of money, and out of ambition.” Still, Maxine wanted to carry on.

While Bass emphasizes Maxine’s independent, pathbreaking qualities, he underscores how she is a victim of 1950s mores and the heartless, male-dominated music industry. In the novel, Maxine’s brother, Elvis, and Fabor Robison can indulge their sexual appetites, but she and Bonnie are expected to be chaste. Fabor tries to seduce Bonnie, who rejects him but also wonders if “she was somehow holding her siblings back.” Bonnie is the one who eventually decides to leave the group, choosing to raise a family instead of staying in show business. When Maxine tries to convince a young record company executive that she is still a viable music act, she is dismissed as “old hat.”

In the novel, as in real life, the Browns’ relentless touring, lack of financial security, and personal problems doomed the group. Maxine tries to get her sister back on the road, but Bonnie refuses. Jim Ed goes on to have some success as a solo artist, recording the hit “Pop a Top” and starring in his own television show. Maxine attempts a solo career, but she has little success. Compounding her professional problems are her personal ones. On the road, her marriage crumbles, and she develops a drinking problem. She eventually divorces her unfaithful husband, but she never remarries.

Bass writes that “there is no right or wrong to greatness—there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it.” Maxine sees her fame disappearing before her, but she also can tell how far Elvis had fallen by the time he died. In the novel, she visits Elvis in 1970, where she “knew something was wrong,” as Elvis seems lonely and depressed. After his funeral in 1977, Maxine decides to quit drinking.

Even so, Maxine never abandons her hope that she will revive her career. The portions of the novel describing Maxine’s later life are poignant, with her living alone in West Memphis (Crittenden County), “all but deaf” and suffering from vertigo. She is thirty years sober, but also isolated and desperate. She puts an advertisement in a grocery store asking someone in the entertainment business to help her tell her life story. She gets a response from a teenage boy named Jefferson Eads. He is odd and serious, but he has a video camera and a desire to make a movie. Despite her hesitation, Maxine lets the boy film her, and the two strike up a friendship of sorts. The novel ends with the boy showing the film in his classroom with Maxine in attendance.

Nashville Chrome was met with positive reviews. Susan Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times praised Bass’s “lyrical” qualities and his ability to never grip the story “too tightly” and to avoid “the heaviness of so much historical fiction.” Grant Alden of No Depression also praised the book, although he was bothered by Bass’s liberty with some facts. Acknowledging that Nashville Chrome is a novel, Alden doubted that Elvis spent as much time with Bonnie and the Browns as he did in the novel or that Maxine was quite as broken at the end of the book as she might have been in real life. Alden noted that “it is a curious, risky thing, to use real people to tell the story, but no less worth reading for that.”

For additional information:
Bass, Rick. Nashville Chrome. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Donahue, Dick. “The Monday Interview with Rick Bass.” Publisher’s Weekly, September 13, 2010. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/44449-the-monday-interview-with-rick-bass.html (accessed October 10, 2024).

Reynolds, Susan Salter. “Book Review: Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass.” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2010. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-book-20100911-story.html (accessed October 10, 2024).

Colin Edward Woodward
Richmond, Virginia