'Nashville Chrome' fictionalizes life of musical group and Elvis contemporary, The Browns

In the 1950s, three siblings -- Jim Ed, Maxine, and Bonnie Brown -- left poverty behind and became the musical group, The Browns. They sold more records than Elvis Presley, then disappeared. Their story has been told in a novel, Nashville Chrome, by Rick Bass.

 In an Atlanta Journal and Constitution review of the book, Gina Webb writes that the three from rural Arkansas had their career peak in 1959 with a number one hit, "The Three Bells." Their close harmonies and syrupy voices eventually defined "the Nashville sound," that according to Webb, is "a slick pop-influenced product of the ’50s and early ’60s, heavy on the violins and background vocals."

The Los Angeles Times review by Susan Salter Reynolds points out how the novel portrays each sibling: "The Browns, in Bass' telling, all had their flaws: Floyd was a drunk who often endangered his children; Birdie was slavishly devoted to her children but also to Floyd; Maxine loved the limelight; and so on. Bass captures their trying, that sheer human effort central not only to our existence but to our ability to forgive and evolve."

Elvis is present throughout the novel. In the Washington Post, writer Dave Shiflett mentions that the novel describes Elvis as a "gentle soul who walked in their shadow. Yet he was a marked man who was eventually transformed into what Bass calls 'the bloated extrapolation of insatiable American appetite and surface showmanship.' Even after becoming famous beyond earlier imagining, he told the Browns, 'he was pretty sad most of the time.'"

The author, Rick Bass, has written 24 other books, most set in Texas where he grew up and Montana, where he has lived many years, according to a review by Bryan Woolley in the Dallas Morning News. Woolley writes, "Fame is the theme of Nashville Chrome: how people deal with it while they have it and how they do without it when it's gone. After the trio broke up, Bonnie happily became a mother and middle-school music teacher. Jim Ed, the Browns' lead singer and guitarist, continued as a journeyman Nashville musician. But Maxine, the eldest and most ambitious, couldn't cope with the loss of the spotlight. In old age, living alone in obscurity and penury, she still expected the phone to ring, for an agent to offer her a chance at a comeback, for Hollywood to call and propose a movie about her. It is in her mind that the reader spends much of the novel. ... Nashville Chrome is a splendid novel, perhaps Rick Bass' best."