Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Nashville Chrome

Author: Rick Bass

Narrator: Debra Monk

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-24-11

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

The fiction of Rick Bass has been honored with O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nashville Chrome presents Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown, a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959s country music charts. The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.

Members Reviews:

Rick Bass has written a Masterpiece

I would give this book more stars! It is a Rick Bass Masterpiece of American literature. You will intimately know and love the characters, especially Maxine Brown, and read the exquisitely constructed sentences, paragraphs and pages multiple times in appreciation of the poetic narrative that the author has created. Nashville Chrome is unequivocally in my top ten books ever read.

I wish I had more stars - just an amazing read

Brief summary, no spoilers.

This book is a fictionalization of the lives the Browns - a country trio that dominated the country and pop charts back in the late 1950's. Never heard of them? I hadn't either, and I thought I knew quite a bit about music. As it turns out, The Browns were not only at the top of the charts, they were close friends and buddies with Elvis Presley, and even had the Beatles as fans. But they faded away during the 1960s, and are little known today despite having attained charting records that stand to this day.

What this book does is give us the background of Maxine, Bonnie and Jim Ed Brown, taking us from their impoverished upbringing in the backwoods of the deep south during the depression, all the way to the present, in their old age. In particular, we follow the thoughts and life of Maxine - the eldest sister and the most ambitious. The loss of fame was the hardest on her, and the scenes from her old age are emotional and poignant.

Which is how I can describe this whole novel. I was not that interested in the subject matter of this book, but a friend gave it his highest recommendation so I thought I'd give it a try. The writing is a wonder. Truly. The scenes are so well described, we can see, smell, taste and even feel them. And the ability of the author to so believably get inside the minds of characters in adolescence up to old age is impressive.

This is just a beautifully written story. There are so many exquisite passages, that I wouldn't know where to begin to excerpt. Here is just one short example :

"Floyd was born in 1895. Parts of three centuries separate the then from the now, the beginning of his life and the trailing-away of hers, and yet the sound wave of him, the disturbed energy of his presence and actions in the world, will not fade. A hundred and fifteen years separates where he began and where she is now, and what she remembers when she thinks of her father is not so much the fights of adolescence over control and suspicion, boundaries and rebellion, or his heroic labors in the forest, trying to scrape together a living, but the quiet dark spaces of early evening, the relative silences when he would come in from the mill, smelling of sawdust and diesel, and would go to the cabinet and take down his bottle and pour his first small glass of whiskey."

I hope this book gets a big audience, and I know that I will be picking up some of the author's past works.