Here I Am

By Erin Frazee '05

Photograph by Shayne Lynn

At 9 p.m. on a chilly Wednesday in November, students trickle into the Gamut Room, Middlebury's student-run coffeehouse tucked in the basement of Gifford Hall. They come for refuge from the frosty night; for warm brownies; for the mellow vibe generated by "Jamnesty," a benefit concert for Amnesty International. And they come for Lucy Chapin '06. 

The diminutive Chapin takes the stage to warm applause; she's dressed casually—her slim, worn-out blue jeans have a large hole in the right knee—but casual attire is right at home in this informal, intimate setting. After tuning her acoustic guitar, Chapin pushes up the sleeves of her pink V-neck shirt, brushes the long, blonde hair from her face, clears her throat, and begins to sing. Her voice is resonant and forceful, but also delicate, creating a stage presence that is both passionate and steady; her style and lyricism have been compared to folk-rockers like Patty Griffith and Emmylou Harris. As she shifts her weight from one foot to the other, swaying to the beat of the song, the crowd responds appreciatively—heads nodding in time with the music—and breaks into applause when Chapin strums her last chord.

Though the Middlebury sophomore is relatively new to the College music scene, she's no stranger to the music biz. Though not yet 20, Chapin has already recorded two albums and played numerous festivals. She first picked up a guitar when she was 13 and has been writing songs for, well, she's not sure how long. "Since I was little, for as long as I can remember," she says. Though she's the only one in her family to sing or play an instrument—"a couple [members of her family] are tone deaf," she explains—there was always music playing in the Chapin household. Her father, John Chapin, owned a nightclub called Lloyd's in Hartford, Connecticut, where many well-known musicians—Shawn Colvin, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Taj Mahal, Alison Krauss, Wynton Marsalis—played on a regular basis, and it was a family friend who introduced her to the guitar. Within a few months of her 13th birthday, Chapin was lining up gigs.

While her first performance was at a nature center in Canton, Connecticut, where tanks of amphibians and snakes were covered with canvas to form a stage, most of Chapin's early gigs were in Hartford bars. "Driving Lucy, as an early teen, to a series of sometimes sleazy bars was not consistent with the rather traditional manner in which we raised our three children," her father and chaperone John Chapin admits. "However, my wife and I were always there with watchful eyes peeled." Ultimately, he adds, "we had fun peering into this arcane corner of musical America as Lucy was finding her voice."

After graduating from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire in June 2002, Chapin decided to hit the road before matriculating at Middlebury the following February. Along with a high school friend, Chapin traveled across the United States in a red Subaru Outback, encountering "quirky and talented" characters along the way with whom she could play music.

"I got to play with some bluesmen on the streets of New Orleans, which was really fun and spontaneous," Chapin says. "They probably had 100 people sitting there on the street surrounding them. ... I only knew about two blues songs, and they said, 'You gotta come back down here and bring us some new blues songs to play.' So I went home and wrote 'It's a Sin to Pay a Penny for the Blues.'  (All the blues-men on their buckets/from the restaurant alleyways/they still stink of the crawfish babe/and the Bourbon Street decay/A penny for the blindest lemon/a penny for that BB King/and every man every woman/who taps a broken shoe and sings.) I want to find them again, down on Bourbon Street, and play it with them."

While Chapin has picked up plenty of song material from her personal experiences, like her road trip across the country, much of her recent music has been more academic in origin, though not necessarily in sound. Chapin has not yet declared a major (though she is planning on an English major with a concentration in creative writing) and is taking a broad range of classes, from Eastern Religions to African American Migrations to Spanish to Creative Writing. Two songs written in the past few months have come directly from the readings for these classes: "Hound Dog" is about Richard Wright and injustice against African Americans in the South, and "Santiago Rose" is about Pinochet's regime in Chile in the 1970s, Chapin says. "It's exciting, because what I'm learning in the books that I'm reading and what I'm learning in the relationships that I'm having are coming together . . . metaphors are showing themselves between the two. Cerebral stuff is blending with emotional stuff, and that's my goal."

Struggling to mature her songwriting skills while retaining the youthful optimism that is evident in her earlier work, Chapin hopes to avoid being "automatically put in this genre, like Jewel: you have a guitar and you're female." At some point, she says, she'd love to join a band and can even foresee giving up the guitar, but not the singing and songwriting. The rich and evocative quality of Chapin's voice and her prodigious songwriting talents are what have charmed her admirers in the first place, and many expect Chapin's voice and pen will lead her to bigger stages and brighter lights. For now, however, she's perfectly content playing Middlebury's cozier confines.

"Sing the one about San Antonio," a female voice calls out from the Gamut Room crowd. "Sure," says Chapin with a smile. "This one is for Jenna, my wonderful roommate."

Erin Frazee '05 is from Marstons Mills, Massachusetts.