I was newly married and living in Alabama when my first record came out. My husband, Ernest, and I were really excited. I’d been planning on this since I was eleven.
Unfortunately, its debut coincided with the dawn of the disco era, and I was a singer/songwriter, so it was a total flop.
I had lovely reviews, but they basically said, “Too bad she didn’t put this out five years ago.”
Shortly thereafter I lost my record deal, I got dropped from my publisher, and I found out I was pregnant, all in the same week.
I was like, Great. Let’s shelve the whole singer/songwriter dream. Tried that. The world didn’t want me. Next!
I gave birth to this beautiful baby boy and threw myself into motherhood. In the absence of songwriting, all my creativity came out sideways. I started painting and baking bread, and I even started making these cool little heads out of Play-Doh.
My husband was looking at me out of the corner of his eye thinking, Surely she’ll snap out of it and start writing again.
I was like, “No, I’m having a great time!”
One night around three in the morning, he came up behind me. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to get this Play-Doh nose just right.
I felt his hands on my shoulders, and he leaned in and said, “Honey, it’s time to start writing songs again.”
But I was like, “No, no, no, no, no.”
I was totally in denial.
But a couple of days later, we went and saw this movie called Coal Miner’s Daughter, and it was about the life of Loretta Lynn.
And there was Loretta planting vegetables with at least four of her children climbing all over her and writing a hit song at the same time.
I came out of that movie theater, and I said, I know, I am totally being a baby about this song-writing thing. So I decided to get back to it.
I started writing songs again as I had done in the past, bouncing them off my husband, Ernest, playing him stuff as I was working on it.
I’d say, “Here’s another one, honey.”
I’d play him these songs, and he’d say, “Yeah, you just keep on doing that. Just keep on, write more.”
He didn’t say anything bad or good. He was very kind.
Then one day I played him a song called “Five Minutes.” As I finished it, I looked up, and he was just beaming.
He said, “That’s it. You’re back. That’s a hit. That’s fantastic.”
I said, “Really?”
He said, “Absolutely. And by Friday you’re going to send a tape with that song on it to these three people in Nashville, Tennessee.”
I said, “Oh, no. I’m just doing this for fun.”
He goes, “Oh, yes. You’re going to do that by Friday…or I’m going to start smoking again.”
So I had no choice.
But the good news is, I got a great response, and within six months we were packing up our then five-year-old little boy and moving to Nashville, Tennessee. It was an amazing, terrifying, wonderful, roller-coaster ride of rejection and excitement and meeting people. And finally I started getting a little traction.
During those early years, I would always play my songs for Ernest before I let them leave the house because he had great suggestions. He wasn’t a songwriter, but he was kind of a song doctor.
Late at night after the kid was asleep, we’d pour a little Grand Marnier and he’d say, “What you got?,” and I’d play him what I was working on.
So one night I played him this song. It was really just a part of the song—just a verse and a chorus. It referred to our honeymoon.
It was an unusual song for me to write at that time. It was kind of from my life, but then it wasn’t, because there were a couple of other lines that were very mysterious and sad. There was one line that went:
In the hollow of your shoulder,
There’s a tidepool of my tears,
Where the waves came crashing over,
And the shoreline disappears.
And then the chorus seemed to be talking about the immediacy of life and the preciousness of time, and it said:
We hold it all for a little while, don’t we?
Kiss the dice,
Taste the rain,
Like little knives upon our tongue.
He looked at me like, Wow.
And I just thought, Okay, good, he’s liking this one.
He goes, “No, you don’t understand. This is your defining moment as a songwriter, this is you on another level.”
Now, his favorite songwriter was Bob Dylan, and he looked at me and he said, “Bob Dylan wishes he could write this.”
And I was like, “Okay, honey. That’s great. Really? Wow.”
But then for the foreseeable future, he pestered me relentlessly about finishing this song.
I’d say, “Here’s a new song, honey.”
And he’d say, “Yeah, that’s great. What’s going on with that Bob Dylan song? What’s happening with that?”
But there was so much going on in our lives at that point, and the following spring I started having some real success. Enough success, in fact, that my husband could quit his job, start up our own publishing company, and be a full-time Mr. Mom.
I was just getting ready to put out a record with Warner Brothers and going on tour. Willie Nelson had just hit number one with a song I wrote. And that song, “Five Minutes,” had just gone to number one for Lorrie Morgan. It was crazy, and the phone was ringing, and I’d wake up every morning and couldn’t believe this was all happening.
And right in the middle of that, out of nowhere, Ernest was diagnosed with a very rare form of lymphoma. When we found out about it, unfortunately, it was pretty deeply advanced.
The doctor basically said, “You probably have about six weeks, and you need to just go have some fun and skip the chemo and get your affairs in order.”
I remember us driving home bewildered thinking, This is definitely a bad dream. Thank goodness our son was at a friend’s house, so we climbed into bed, and we took turns holding each other and sobbing for I don’t know how many hours.
Somewhere in the late afternoon, I bolted up and I said, “What day is today?”
And I realized that that evening, like an hour from then, I was meant to be singing at a huge black-tie event for Warner Brothers Records.
To make it worse, I was supposed to be singing a song I had written for my husband when we first met, the story of how we met, and it was a song called “All I Have.”
I said, “Ernest, I have to call and cancel. I can’t do it, there’s no way. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess.”
And he said, “Listen, the only reason that you’d cancel now would be for something like ‘My husband has cancer.’ And I’m not ready for us to tell the world that. Why don’t we just get dressed and go? Let’s walk into a world where I don’t have cancer and hang out for a couple hours, and we’ll come back here and we’ll deal with all this later.”
Somehow he talked me into it. I remember being in a surreal, altered state. It was an amazing evening, and I did pretty well, except halfway through the song I was looking down and he was beaming up at me in his beautiful tuxedo. He looked so healthy, and all of a sudden I thought, Whoa, and I remembered what we were going through.
I don’t know what words came out of my mouth. There was a completely new second verse written in some language from another planet, and then, thank God, I got back on board at the chorus. But in the end it was good that we went, because what else were we going to do? We were in shock.
The next morning, though, we were reading the newspaper and there was an article about the event. It mentioned that there had been somebody in attendance who had left the event and suddenly died of a coronary.
That was incredibly impactful to Ernest.
He looked up at me, and he said, “Wait a minute. Nobody can tell me when I’m going to die. I’m not going do this with an expiration date stamped on me. We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do it right. I’m going to stay here and fight to live and be in this world as long as I can, whatever it takes.”
And that’s what he did. And instead of six weeks, we had eighteen months together.
It was an incredible period of time. There were friends, and love, and support, and terrible days of surgeries and chemo, and all the best, and all the worst, and an incredible constant of the present moment that we could appreciate on a level we would’ve never been able to before.
It was amazing and wondrous, but mostly—it sucked.
And the day came when the outcome was obvious—we weren’t going to be able to turn it around.
And so Ernest went from using all his energy to fight to live, and he shifted in the most beautiful, graceful way into “How do I learn to die?”
We came to the point where we were having those conversations, and he said, “Look, I want you to take my ashes to the Gulf of Mexico,” in the spot where we went fishing on our honeymoon, “and I want you to know that when you walk out to any body of water on earth, you’ll feel me there with you.”
We finished talking about some other practical stuff, and then he said, “Now, there’s just this one more thing, and this is really important.”
And I’m like, “What?”
“Well, it’s that matter of the Dylan song. What’s going on with that song? Did you finish it?”
I said, “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe you’re asking me to do that.”
(I had a bit of a fit.)
He said, “You know, I don’t have that much time, so maybe you want to work on it this afternoon?”
He was relentless about this song.
I said, “Um, excuse me, my husband’s dying, I’m a little busy right now. But yeah, maybe I’ll get around to it.”
He said, “Look…”
I said, “No. No,” and I got up, and I stomped out of the room and headed for the other end of the house.
And he’s calling down the hall, “Consider it my dying wish!”
Somehow, by some grace of God—because by the time I got to the other end of the hall, I was fuming—I started to form this idea in my mind of what it would be.
I started writing it down. I was all like, I’ll show that guy.
I stomped back into the room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and got really still.
I sang,
So let ’em turn my soul
Seven shades of blue.
And with the ocean’s roll, baby,
I will wave to you.
And the birds will sing my laughter,
And the whales will steal my song.
But I’ll be happy ever after,
And the world will get along.
He had tears in his eyes, and he said, “That’s perfect.”
And I said, “Oh, thank God.”
But then he goes, “Except for one word.”
And I’m like, Seriously? You’re going to critique my song now?
He said, “It’s just this one word that’s not quite accurate. See, I don’t really know that I’m going to be happy ever after. But I’m pretty sure I can promise you that I’ll be okay. So you can say, ‘I’ll be okay forever after, and the world will get along.’ How about that, honey? What do you think?”
I said, “Fine.”
I was just glad to be done with it.
So the year following Ernest’s death was a big blur. I was more the “frozen widow” than the “grieving widow,” pressing ahead feeling no need to cry, in a kind of standoff with grief, while my son was very much grieving and turning thirteen. I had too much to do to possibly do anything about this giant boulder of grief that I was carting around with me like a ball and chain.
People would ask, “How are you doing?”
And I’d say, “I’m fine.”
I definitely wasn’t falling apart enough for them. But I was just putting one foot in front of the other.
I finished a lot of songs, and I was getting ready to go into the studio with Rodney Crowell, who’s one of my heroes—a great songwriter, great artist, great producer, and a great friend. He was a great friend of my husband as well. So I was in good hands.
We go into the studio. Day one I get behind the microphone, everything’s great. I start singing the song. The Dylan song. That was the first one to get down.
By then it was called “Seven Shades of Blue.” I started singing it, and I was fine. But when I got to the line “ ‘In the hollow of your shoulder, there’s a tide pool of my tears, where the waves came crashing over, and the shoreline disappears,’ ” and I just stopped.
All of a sudden, the tumblers fell into place and I realized that I had written those lines two years ago, a year before he was diagnosed. And the day he was diagnosed, I actually lived those lines. I mean, when we came home from the doctor’s office and we held each other, I felt like I had literally cried a tide pool of tears into the hollow of his shoulder.
It just stunned me, and it cracked me open completely, releasing all the sorrow and sadness that I’d been holding back, and at the same time I had this feeling of wonder and grace.
Who does that? Who writes for themselves ahead of time?
Unfortunately, that opened the floodgates, and I started sobbing, and I could not stop sobbing for the rest of the day. And all these really expensive musicians—first-class musicians—standing around waiting for me to pull it together.
And the studio’s two thousand dollars a day, and I said, “Rodney, we’ve got to cancel. We’ve got to cancel, and I’ll come back in a week.”
And he says, “Oh, no. We’re going to wait this out. I don’t care how long it takes. Take your time. I’m going to wait for the performance that’s on the other side of that wall of tears.”
And that’s the performance that’s on the record today.
I can hear in my voice, even now when I listen to it, the sound of the calm after the storm.
The sound of somebody who has been through the worst and finds themselves in a place where they can sing, “ ‘I’ll be okay forever after, and the world will get along.’ ”
BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN, a twice Grammy-nominated, Nashville-based singer/songwriter, has released thirteen solo albums and written seven number-one hits and had songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Bette Midler, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Michael McDonald, Keb’ Mo’, Roberta Flack, Waylon Jennings, and Indigo Girls, including Faith Hill’s megahit “This Kiss,” ASCAP’s 1999 Song of the Year. Beth’s songs have been featured in film and TV, and her work has been diverse, from singing in nine different languages on Prism (2007) to The Mighty Sky (2012), a Grammy-nominated astronomy album for kids of all ages. BBC Radio’s Bob Harris titled her 2014 release UnCovered, in which she reclaims her hits, and features legendary guests from Vince Gill to Duane Eddy. Sand & Water, written in the wake of her husband’s death, was performed by Elton John to honor the memory of Princess Diana. Her latest album, Hearts of Glass, has been named one of the top 10 Best Roots Records of 2018. A breast-cancer survivor and environmentalist, Beth also teaches workshops internationally and considers herself a “creativity midwife” with a passion to inspire others to blossom fully into their creative lives. In 2016 Beth was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
This story was told on September 14, 2016, at The Great Hall of The Cooper Union in New York City. The theme of the evening was Knocked Out. Director: Meg Bowles.
