Thirty-six years ago Tracy Chapman released her first album and won multiple Grammy awards. On Sunday, thirty-six years later, she performed at the 2024 Grammy ceremonies, and brought back strong feelings for many who came of age in that time. This is what the AJC wrote before her first performance in Atlanta.
Early this year, a 24-year-old named Tracy Chapman sang and played her guitar for spare change in front of the Harvard Coop. The student cooperative-record shop, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a spacious marble entryway with good acoustics for busking.
Eight weeks later, Ms. Chapman’s self-titled debut album was the No. 1 seller in that same store.
Credit: Elektra Records
Credit: Elektra Records
Though sudden fame in pop music is nothing new, the phenomenal response to “Tracy Chapman,” released in April, is a Cinderella story with a difference. Unlike the average overnight success, Chapman is black, female and gifted. Unlike the usual pop divas, she does not spin danceable tunes of modern love. She sings of average desperate people, emotional warfare and, in “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution,” she cries for change. These are folk songs in a pop setting, with the timelessness and the darkness that set folk music apart.
Each of the 11 cuts on her record is a miniature story, a tale told with minimal language and supported by very few background instruments. At front and center is Chapman’s rich, deep voice, a startling sound that thrives in this stark setting.
She is, in other words, a singer-songwriter in the mold of Bob Dylan and Leadbelly, a performer for whom the voice and the song are central, and all else is peripheral. But few singer-songwriters receive such early, enthusiastic acclaim. Until this year, Chapman had not performed outside New England. When tickets for her July 23rd performance at Atlanta’s Center Stage Theatre were made available, they sold out within 34 minutes, the fastest sell-out in the hall’s history.
Last week, she walked on stage at Denver’s Rainbow Music Hall and received a standing ovation before she played the first note. According to Jeff Cook, senior director of album promotion at Elektra Records, she has been invited to join Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen and other veterans in the Amnesty International concert tour that begins this fall in Canada and will travel through Russia and China. Cook added that Chapman will also open some shows for Dylan this summer.
During the last 10 days, her album sold 400,000 copies, pushing it over the 1 million mark, Cook said. According to Billboard magazine, “Tracy Chapman” became the year’s second-fastest-breaking Top 10 album in early July, rising to No. 9 in its 11th week on the Top Pop Album charts. That performance is even more remarkable considering that the album’s single, “Fast Car,” did not crack the Top 40 until the last two weeks. The album trailed Rick Astley’s “Whenever You Need Somebody,” which rose to the Top 10 in eight weeks, boosted by constant airplay on hit radio. By contrast, hit radio avoided “Tracy Chapman” until recently - the record generated its initial momentum at college radio stations such as Atlanta’s WRAS-FM.
The story of Chapman’s success began with the press. Her record sparked unanimous critical approval, kicked off by major pieces in The New York Times and the Village Voice. Almost every music magazine followed suit. Last weekend, Rolling Stone magazine shot photographs of the singer for an upcoming cover, according to the Elektra spokesman, who added that Chapman’s management was politely turning down requests from Spin magazine for a cover photo session. This kind of attention calls to mind the time Springsteen’s face graced the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously.
The media onslaught that made Springsteen a household word also incited a backlash that had some critics dismissing the Boss as a product of the hype machine. Springsteen proved to have the mettle and talent to turn around the naysayers. Other heavily hyped musicians, such as Peter Frampton and the band the Knack, were not as well-prepared, and had to pay dearly for the overexposure. Chapman seems to sense a similar danger. “She’s totally overwhelmed,” said one Elektra official. It seems, however, that this singer also has the substance to survive.
Tracy Chapman grew up in Cleveland, reared by a single-parent mother who also sang part time at weddings and other social events. She was a shy, withdrawn girl, who wrote stories and songs to amuse herself. “I was never happy in Cleveland,” she told Musician magazine, “and from the time I was young [I] was intent on creating a life for myself that was different from the way I grew up.”
A turning point came when Chapman won a scholarship to the Wooster School, a boarding school in Danbury, Conn. There she was exposed to music from Dylan, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and others in the folk tradition. She began performing her songs, encouraged during her sophomore year when the school chaplain took up a collection to buy Chapman a new guitar.
As an anthropology major at Tufts University, Chapman was a classmate of Brian Koppelman, son of Charles Koppelman, a partner in SBK Productions. Brian convinced his father to listen to Chapman perform, and soon SBK, one of the largest music publishing and production companies in the world, had become a powerful ally.
Offered record contracts by several independent labels, Chapman held off signing any papers until she had graduated from Tufts in 1986. She continued to perform in clubs around Cambridge and Boston and in the streets of Harvard Square.
The young woman acknowledges her connections to the white folk tradition, and her debt to the semirevival of folk music in the 1980s. Suzanne Vega, the feather-voiced Greenwich Village singer whose chilling song-poems won accolades and Top 10 status last year with “Luka,” helped prove that pop-inspired folk could also sell. Like Chapman, Vega took on heavy topics such as child abuse and alienation. “In some ways, she opened the door for me,” Chapman has said.
But Chapman’s plaintive, muscular alto is a long way from Vega’s airy whispers; it is closer to the tradition of Bessie Smith and Bonnie Raitt. Chapman’s voice is smoky with the blues. It pushes against the beat with a forceful presence that makes a rhythm section unnecessary.
When she sings the a cappella “Behind The Wall,” about a silent witness to ongoing domestic beatings, Chapman’s voice breaks angrily, urgently.
The bleak scenes of city life in this debut album are repeated in “Across the Lines,” about racial violence, and “Fast Car,” the stubborn hope of a young woman trapped tending an alcoholic father and supporting an unemployed friend. The chorus is optimistic: “City lights lay out before us/ And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder/ And I had a feeling that I belonged/ And I had a feeling I could be someone.” But it gives way to the reality of the verse: “You got a fast car/ And I got a job that pays all our bills.”
The record is not all downbeat. “For You” is a straightforward love song, and “Mountains O’ Things” pokes tongue-in-cheek fun at the lust for possessions common to the rich and the poor. But the palette that this artist uses is dominated by darker emotions. Like Rembrandt’s self-portraits, the songs employ this abundant darkness to draw even greater attention to the moments when the light breaks through.
