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BY MELISSA RUGGIERI
As a girl attending Willis Sutton Middle School, Michelle Malone had ample access to Chastain Park.
She often would explore the grounds with her grandmother, who would bring her to the Witches Cave, the legendary-to-locals horseshoe-shaped rock cave near West Wieuca Road, where kids would sprint through before the “witches” could seize them (sorry, explorers, it’s since been closed off with dirt and cement).
As a teenager, Malone would “run around the woods there at night, doing God knows what,” she said with a laugh.
But one of her most distinctive memories from those teenage years roaming the area was her middle-of-the-night pilgrimage to Chastain Park Amphitheatre.
There, Malone stood on the stage, looked around the cavernous bowl-shaped venue and could only think, “Wow.”
Now, more than two decades into a career as a lauded guitar-rockin’ folk-blues singer-songwriter, Malone, who has since graced the Chastain stage plenty of times, will return Friday for the annual Rock Chastain benefit concert.
“I often talk about growing up in Atlanta and how much pride I have in being a native and how much I love Georgia and Georgia music, so maybe it was an obvious choice (to ask me to play),” Malone said recently from her Atlanta home. “But I’ll always jump at the chance to help Chastain.”
Joining Malone is Georgia mainstay Chuck Leavell, the Alabama-reared keyboard legend who has shared stages and studios with everyone from the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton to the Allman Brothers Band.
As co-founder of the Atlanta-based Mother Nature Network and proud caretaker of Charlane Plantation, a 2,500-acre tree farm outside of Macon that he shares with wife Rose Lynn, Leavell’s Georgia roots run deep.
"Georgia has been in my blood a long, long time. This is home," Leavell said this past summer, when he performed at Bobby Dodd Stadium with the Stones.
Credit: Melissa Ruggieri
Credit: Melissa Ruggieri
Leavell and Malone share some musical history as well, and Malone said they’re “trying to cook up a song or two” to perform together during the concert to benefit the Chastain Park Conservancy, which celebrates volunteerism and community activism involving the welfare and sustainability of Chastain Park and its resources.
Leavell played on some of the songs on Malone's 2012 record, "Day 2." (She recently released the robust "Stronger Than You Think" and will likely unfurl some of those new tunes at Chastain.) Malone and Leavell also performed together at the Celebrating Georgia With Chuck Leavell and Friends concert at Symphony Hall in 2014.
“He’s an amazing talent, an amazing person,” Malone said of Leavell. “He has no idea that he’s a Rolling Stone or an Allman Brother, and I love that about him. He puts you at ease.”
Malone, who will stick around home to play an Oct. 24 show at Eddie’s Attic and return to the venue for a New Year’s Eve bash, will bring her band — including Reno Roberts on guitar, Trish Land on percussion, Benjamin Williams on bass and Jaron Pearlman on drums — to the Chastain performance.
She has high praise for what she calls her “Georgia musical family.”
“I can’t tell you how special it is in Georgia, having lived other places, to have this loving, supportive community,” Malone said.
Of the Chastain show, she said, “What they’re doing is so great for the community. It’s a green space that we know and love and we need to keep all the green spaces we can. They’re trying to make it better for Atlantans and I applaud that.”
CONCERT PREVIEW
Rock Chastain. With Chuck Leavell and Michelle Malone. 7 p.m. Oct. 16. $50-$200. Chastain Park Amphitheatre, 4469 Stella Drive N.W., Atlanta. 1-800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.
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