Book review: ‘Nashville Chrome'

Before there was Elvis, there were the Browns.

They were siblings from rural Arkansas — Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie — whose star streaked through the country and pop charts in the 1950s, peaking in 1959 when their folk-pop hit, “The Three Bells,” charted number-one on the Billboard Hot 100. They toured Europe, sold more records than Elvis, and became one of Nashville’s biggest crossover success stories.

Within a decade, the group was all but forgotten.

In Rick Bass’ latest book, “Nashville Chrome,” he reinvents the life and times of the Browns, whose close harmonies and syrupy voices defined “the Nashville sound,” a slick pop-influenced product of the ’50s and early ’60s, heavy on the violins and background vocals.

Bass tells their rags-to-riches-to-rags story chronologically, beginning with a childhood of dire poverty, and tracing the trio’s rise and fall, most of which happens in Nashville or on tour. Interspersed with this history are chapters that take place in the present, narrated in Maxine’s voice, a fierce blend of disillusionment and ambition that recalls some, if not all, of the real force behind the band’s success.

Their story is a familiar one: the Browns make it out of Arkansas on the strength of Maxine’s decision to send a tape of her brother’s voice to a radio station; Maxine and Jim Ed are “discovered” on the Louisiana Hayride; they add sister Bonnie and tour with a young Elvis Presley; they hobnob with Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins and Jim Reeves; they meet up with a Machiavellian manager, Fabor Robinson, and sign away every royalty they had coming to them no matter how many millions of records they sold.

A Texas native, Bass is an award-winning writer renowned for his nonfiction about the wilderness areas of Utah and Montana, his precise naturalism and rhapsodic prose style right at home with majestic valleys and mountains. But in a fictionalized biography of country music singers, this approach can become a little overheated, and Bass’ “attempt to portray the emotional truths of their journey and its challenges” sometimes sends the facts so far into the stratosphere it strains credibility.

The Browns aren’t just poor, they breathe the despair of poverty, “would have breathed it like the fog vapors that rose some nights from the swamp, would have absorbed it night and day, until it became so wreathed within them that soon enough it would have begun to replace the spirits with which they had come into the world.”

They don’t just sit beside a creek together, they await their momentous future: “In the last free days before they became aware that they had a gift—not a gift they had asked for or labored toward, but which had been impressed on them since birth—and they waited, one must assume, for the wisps of despair and misery to begin to soak into their skin like smoke from the burning of the slash piles, blue smoke hanging in sunlit rafts all throughout the forest, as if a great war were being fought, one about which they knew nothing, one of which they were entirely unaware.”

Gorgeous writing, but the reader soon longs for a less mythic explanation of the Browns’ familial harmonies: for instance, the way the kids listened religiously every Saturday to the “Grand Ole Opry” radio show, then tried to imitate what they heard.

Maxine Brown’s chapters, by contrast, are gutsier, more down to earth. When we meet the eldest Brown, now in her 80s, she is a frail recovering alcoholic living off Social Security and disability payments, bitterly obsessed with where the “greatness” went: “Was there one exact day when the fire went out and life changed over from wonder into a long, cold march?”

Maybe, but Maxine has never surrendered her hope for a comeback. To that end, about two-thirds through the book, she and a junior high school filmmaker named Jefferson collaborate on a documentary of her life. Jefferson uses even loftier staging than Bass in his attempt to mine emotional truths, at one point, inexplicably directing Maxine to dress in white and wander around in the dark carrying a lantern.