CAGED HEAT

By RICHARD CORLISS

A full moon was out, a couple of nights before Halloween 1993, when Marshall Chapman and her band, the Love Slaves, played at the Tennessee State Prison for Women. That might explain the kindred electricity between the veteran bar balladeer and her captive audience--women doing time for the kinds of misbehavior people write country tunes about. The resultant live album, It's About Time...(Margaritaville Records), is sad, strong stuff, and may be the most potent peek into the connection between lock-up desperation and good country blues since Johnny Cash played Folsom Prison in 1968.

You can almost hear the inmates nod when Chapman sings about guys who "hang around me like a bad debt." The convicts cheer when a Chapman woman takes control--when one announces to a boozing boyfriend, "I'm gonna take off my kid gloves/ Put on some boxing gloves/ And knock the living daylights out of you." But she's not all whine and neurosis; the set traces an arc of anger, resolve and transfiguration. As Chapman explains to the prisoners, with an I've-been-saved smile in her voice, she finally did find true love--with a prison doctor.

A couple of tunes are, like the 6-ft.-plus Chapman, on the long and thin side. And somebody ought to tell her that good doesn't rhyme with either food or blood. But passion, not precision, is her forte. Her soul-felt songs are the cries of a woman who lives with pain and learns from it. In the set's sweetest anthem, she sings, "So be your own parent/ And treat yourself good/ It's never too late/ To have a happy childhood." As the lifers and loners in Chapman's audience know, the good times have got to start sometime.