Melissa Ruth and The Likely Stories, Amee Chapman

Melissa Ruth & The Likely Stories are a four-piece band based out of Eugene, OR. They play music that they dub Doo-Wop Twang: The space of blues, the teeth of country, the grit of rock n roll.
Amee Chapman has spent her life in Northern California, the daughter of prison workers. Having picked up her first guitar during the 5th grade, Amee found herself falling in to the rhythms of a musician’s life easily and early. Over the course of the next 30 years, she would find herself taking up home on a fishing boat in Moss Landing, in a double wide on a pumpkin patch, on the isolated ridge of a goat farm, and now a treasured beach town. With a voice that conveys both the brutal honesty of a changing California and the tender footed sweetness of its past, Amee Chapman maintains a meandering love affair with the roots of American music and with the oft times bitter realities of rural soul. Influenced by the likes of Lucinda Williams, Esther Phillips, and Jeff Tweedy, her singing, songwriting and guitar playing reflect the images of the average and eccentric: lonesome highway phone booths, sea faring whiskey rebels, city wise angeled outlaws and suicidal tattooed cowboys, all of them pent up together on a stretch of land between the past and the present.