Tracy Chapman

singer; songwriter

Personal Information

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 30, 1964.
Education: Graduated from Tufts University.

Career

Singer-songwriter; released debut album, Tracy Chapman, 1988; participated in 1--nation Amnesty International tour, 1988; released Crossroads, 1989; released Matters of the Heart, 1992; released New Beginning, 1995; performed on Lilith Fair tour, 1996; released Telling Stories, 2000.

Life's Work

With a unique style that combined folk music with an African American sensibility, singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman took the pop-music world by storm in 1988. That year, her debut album was released. It sold upwards of ten million copies, and its lead single "Fast Car" became almost universally known among music fans. One of the few late twentieth-century musicians in any genre outside of hip-hop to succeed in delivering a political message to a wide audience, Chapman also helped pave the way for the resurgence of strong, independent female voices in the popular music of the late 1990s.

Chapman was born on March 30, 1964, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her parents divorced when she was four, and her mother found it extremely difficult to raise Chapman and her older sister Aneta. "Sometimes there was no electricity, or the gas would be shut off," Chapman told Time. "I remember standing with my mother in the line to get food stamps." Her mother was a music lover with a large record collection and a determination to nurture her daughter's musical talents. Chapman played the ukulele in elementary school, and later studied clarinet and organ.

Watched "Hee Haw"

It might seem easy to assume that Chapman's bent toward political folk music came about after she entered the elite educational institutions to which she later gained admission. In fact, both her interest in politics and her attraction to the guitar began while she was still in Cleveland. "As a child, I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations," she told Rolling Stone. "I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me--also because I read a lot." Another influence, surprisingly enough, came from country music. "One of the things that made me want to learn how to play guitar was watching Buck Owens and Roy Clark and Minnie Pearl on Hee Haw when I was 8 years old," she told Time. "The guitars they played were beautiful."

Chapman won an ABC (A Better Chance) scholarship to the prestigious Wooster School, a prep school in Danbury, Connecticut. She honed her songwriting skills in the school's coffeehouse, starred on its basketball and soccer teams, and was heavily recruited by several top colleges as she approached her graduation in 1982. Enrolling at Tufts University outside Boston, Chapman began studying veterinary medicine, but later switched to anthropology and ethnomusicology--the study of music from outside Western traditions. She continued singing and, on one occasion, played for loose change in the busy public spaces of Harvard Square.

Chapman gained a strong following in the numerous folk coffeehouses and clubs of Boston and nearby Cambridge. She numbered among her admirers a fellow Tufts student, Brian Koppelman, whose father Charles Koppelman was an executive at the large SBK music publishing firm. Chapman's contact with the elder Koppelman, who was bowled over by her songs, led to others. She teamed with veteran manager Elliot Roberts, who had worked with folk-rock stars Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and was signed to the Elektra record label.

Debut Album Reaches Number One

Chapman began her career almost reluctantly, showing little interest in financial gain and, at one point, turning down an offer from an independent label so as not to interrupt her studies. Promising though her first steps might have seemed, neither Chapman nor anyone at Elektra could have been prepared for the success of her debut album Tracy Chapman, which was released in 1988. The album reached the Number One position on Billboard magazine's pop charts, a rare accomplishment for an unknown newcomer. "Fast Car," a vivid, densely packed narrative of a young woman who dreams of a better future but is dragged down by a series of troubles, became one of the most widely heard songs of the late 1980s.

The album owed its success to a variety of virtues. Often compared with folk/jazz vocalist Joan Armatrading, Chapman also resembled 1960s folk icon Richie Havens in her ability to bring a distinctively African American sensibility to the predominantly white-oriented genre of folk music. However musically distant her style might seem from those of the rap artists who were beginning to flourish in the late 1980s, Chapman shared with the rappers an ambitious way with words and a desire to tell the stories of the American underclass. Some of her songs had a vaguely Caribbean sound, and she drew on the heavily verbal qualities of genres from that part of the world. That aspect of Chapman's music was reinforced visually by her trademark short dreadlocks.

Such songs as "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" espoused an uncompromising political message that was light-years away from the shiny dance pop that was the norm during the late 1980s. Chapman became the subject of intense publicity for some months after the release of her debut album. She won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy awards, and several other major awards. Expectations ran high for Chapman's sophomore release, Crossroads, which was released in 1989.

Sales Slipped

Crossroads sold four million copies, a smash hit by any standards except for those of an artist whose debut album had sold ten million. Sales slipped further with the release of Chapman's third album, Matters of the Heart, in 1992. Some critics speculated that the public had grown tired of Chapman's political themes. However, like many other folk-oriented artists, Chapman had been writing songs for many years before making her first recording. She had gradually exhausted her storehouse of material and, as she recorded subsequent albums, was unable to write new material under the glare of publicity and celebrity.

Indeed, when Chapman's New Beginning album put her back near the top of the charts in 1995, it was due to the success of a song, "Give Me One Reason," that she had written a decade earlier while still in college. Fans still flocked to Chapman's concerts, and public admiration of her music's distinctiveness remained strong. She became a star attraction on the all-female Lilith Fair tour in 1996. After the release of the New Beginning album, Chapman took a leave of absence from the recording process. "I felt like my life was on this cycle that was beyond my control," she told Time. "Making records and touring, making records and touring, and in that process not being at home and not being settled. They weren't particularly happy times."

Chapman re-emerged in 2000 with her fifth album, Telling Stories. Reviews were mixed, with Interview praising the album's "intimate and personal" quality and noting approvingly that Chapman "doesn't make an album until she's got something to say." Entertainment Weekly was less enthusiastic, remarking that "Chapman remains an enigma: an intelligent, levelheaded craftsperson unable to convey any emotion beyond resignation." Whatever the future direction of her career, Chapman had already fulfilled the ambition of the woman she depicted in the song "Fast Car": to "be someone, be someone."

Awards

Three Grammy awards, including Best New Artist, for Tracy Chapman, 1988.

Works

Selected discography

• Tracy Chapman, Elektra, 1988.
• Crossroads, Elektra, 1989.
• Matters of the Heart, Elektra, 1992.
• New Beginning, Elektra, 1995.
• Telling Stories, Elektra/Asylum, 2000.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Musicians, volume 4, Gale, 1991; volume 20, Gale, 1997.
• Graff, Gary, ed., MusicHound Rock: The Essential Guide, Visible Ink, 1996.
• Larkin, Colin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Muze UK, 1998.
• Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book II, Gale, 1996.

Periodicals

• Billboard, February 12, 2000, p. 11.
• Entertainment Weekly, February 18, 2000, p. 86.
• Interview, March 2000, p. 88.
• Life, August 1988, p. 60.
• The Nation, July 6, 1992, p. 30.
• Playboy, July 1988, p. 26.
• Rolling Stone, September 22, 1998, p. 54.
• Time, March 12, 1990, p. 70; February 28, 2000, p. 92.

Other

• Additional information for this profile was obtained from http://www.allmusic.com.

— James M. Manheim

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Quotes:

"I'm a hopeful cynic."

For The Record...

Born in 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio Education: Tufts University, B.A., 1986. Signed with Elektra Records, late 1980s; released self-titled debut album, 1988; performed at Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, London, 1988; participated in Amnesty International's 15-Nation Human Rights Now! tour, 1988; performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center Spring Gala of Jazz, New York City, 2006; toured Europe, 2008-09. Awards: Grammy Awards: Best New Artist, Best Contemporary Folk Performance, for Tracy Chapman; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, for "Fast Car," all 1989; Grammy Award, Best Rock Song, for "Give Me One Reason," 1997. Addresses: Record company—Elektra Records, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019-6908. Web site—Tracy Chapman Official Web site: http://www.tracychapman.com/

Folk singer

Over the course of 20 years and eight albums, Tracy Chapman has sped in and out of the spotlight. The four-time Grammy winner touched a nerve with her 1988 self-titled debut, which climbed to number one on the album charts in both the United States and United Kingdom on the strength of three hit singles: "Fast Car," "Talkin' Bout a Revolution" and "Baby Can I Hold You." Filled with impassioned and fiery lyrics, the album was seen as a beacon for social change, catapulting the 24-year-old folkie to international fame and celebrity—which she found disconcerting. Chapman's powerful narratives, sparsely arranged music and smoky contralto were a revelation, both a throwback to the protest music of the civil rights era and unlike anything else on the radio at the time. Album sales reached ten million. Chapman floundered with her next two albums, but her fourth offering, 1995's New Beginning, was highly successful, featuring the hit "Give Me One Reason." Through the next decade, Chapman continued to produce albums of finely crafted, acoustic-grounded songs, though they failed to gain much traction.

In 2008 Chapman released Our Bright Future, which, like most of her albums, contained insightful, politically inspired lyrics. This album, as well as several of its predecessors, failed to match the enormity of her initial successes, yet Chapman told Stuart Husband of London's Mail on Sunday that she did not mind the retreat from the spotlight, which allowed her to spend time recording and touring in smaller settings. "I'm glad it happened, because it has left me in this fortunate position, but I've always made quite intimate music; it was never meant to be played in enormous domes. People were hungry to hear a voice like mine when I first came along, and I've kept this core of support. I don't need to make any more money, so I just get to be creative, do the thing that I love."

Raised During Tumultuous Times
Chapman was born in 1964 in Cleveland, Ohio; her parents separated when she was four. She and her older sister, Aneta, lived with their mother, who refused alimony and relied on low-paying jobs and welfare to raise her daughters. For a time, Chapman's mother worked in a local rubber factory. "There wasn't much to work with," Chapman told the Rolling Stone's Stephen Pond. "We always had food to eat and a place to stay, but it was fairly bare-bones kind of things." One thing the home was filled with was music. Chapman's mom sang gospel tunes and Chapman picked up the ukulele, organ and clarinet as a kid. At age eight, she received a guitar and began writing songs. On the radio, Chapman listened to Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.

Growing up in Cleveland in the late 1960s and early 1970s proved rough; the social tensions that Chapman witnessed came through in her music later on. During her childhood many of the city's factories—which em- ployed the local African-American population—closed. The segregated city was forced to integrate its schools and kids were bussed all over town while citizens protested and threw rocks. When Chapman was 13 and walking home from school, a white boy yelled racial slurs at her, something she was accustomed to. However, on this day Chapman shouted back. The boy pulled a gun on Chapman and beat her while his friends watched. To take her mind off the world around her, Chapman turned to books, filling her head with the words of Maya Angelou and James Baldwin.

Chapman escaped Cleveland by earning a scholarship to Wooster School, an Episcopalian prep school in Danbury, Connecticut. There she played basketball, softball and soccer, performed her songs in the campus coffeehouse, and heard the folk rock of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young for the first time. In the fall of 1982 she enrolled at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, near Boston. Chapman studied anthropology, continued writing songs and played her music on the street in Harvard Square and in local folk clubs. Before graduation, she caught the attention of Elektra Records, which hired music industry veteran David Kershenbaum to produce her first record. Kershenbaum had previously worked with Joe Jackson, Joan Baez, and Cat Stevens, among other artists.

Enjoyed Fast Ride to Success
Chapman's self-titled debut came out in 1988 and Chapman, fresh from college, was ill-equipped to deal with her newfound fame. The album exceeded everyone's expectations. "I'd heard that the record company was hoping they'd sell 200,000 copies of my first record, which I think would have been pretty significant," Chapman told Wil Marlow of England's Birmingham Post. "But it went on to sell many more than that. No one was really prepared, me least of all. It was pretty overwhelming." The super-shy Chapman suddenly found herself in the spotlight, with album reviews popping up everywhere. Playboy wrote that Chapman's voice was "laced with equal parts bitterness and dignity." Time called her "a cultural icon. Her short, spiky dreadlocks signaled a move away from pop glitter. Her music, pared down, almost willfully naive, was an antidote to the synthesized sound of the 1980s."

Chapman earned three Grammy Awards for the album, including one for best new artist. In songs like "Fast Car," Chapman sang about poverty's human toll, racial violence, domestic abuse, police indifference, and obsessive love. "Chapman hits emotional chords the way the best folk singers always have," Pond wrote, "but whereas female folkies have traditionally been painted as vulnerable, fragile creatures singing about their love and fears, Chapman trashes that stereotype. While there's a vulnerability in her best songs, there's no fragility, just forthright dignity."

As Chapman gained a reputation for her earnest lyrics and songs touching on the human condition, she was invited to perform at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert in June of 1988, a concert celebrating freedom and hope held in honor of the famed South African anti-apartheid activist. Chapman gained international fame for her performance in front of 72,000 people at Britain's Wembley Stadium while millions of television viewers tuned in. Subsequently, she opened concerts for Neil Young and Bob Dylan. In the fall of 1988, Chapman shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Peter Gabriel during Amnesty International's 15-nation Human Rights Now! tour. Over the years, Chapman has also worked with Free Tibet and the American Foundation for Aids Research.

Hit Skid in the Road
In 1989 Chapman released Crossroads and followed with Matters of the Heart in 1992. While these albums shared a similar tone and theme with her debut album, they lacked the compelling characters and narratives that drove her first album up the charts. Sales slipped and critics chided Chapman's lyrical lapse and legendary reticence, with one reviewer even taking exception to the fact that she "posed unsmiling with eyes facing away from the camera" on her album covers. "Chapman's … voice, with its small but expressive dips and curves, enriches any material it touches, but her material has become a problem," Gene Santoro wrote in The Nation, adding that her latest songs were mainly "political soundbites or cliches about love and need." Howard Cohen, writing for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, suggested that some of the trouble resulted from her subject matter. "Pop music by its nature is disposable and fans can be fickle, but Chapman's fall seemed particularly steep," Cohen wrote, noting that political themes in pop music quickly become dated.

In 1995, seven years after her spectacular debut, Chapman was back on top on the strength of her fourth record, the aptly titled New Beginning, and its infectious single "Give Me One Reason." Ironically, Chapman had written the song a decade earlier, while still a senior at Tufts. In any event, her concerts were sold out, the album sold 100,000 copies a week, and she even smiled in the photos on the CD jacket. Time attributed Chapman's resurgence to, well, being nice. "She's always preferred to keep her distance from real-life record-buying people," the magazine reported. "In concerts, even the most ardent acclaim left her stonefaced and unmoved. Much of her time was spent holed up in her San Francisco mansion. Fans eventually repaid the favor: Chapman's last two albums sank with nary a trace. Well, the reality check has finally arrived: Chapman now reads fan mail aloud in concerts."

Five years passed before Chapman released her next album, 2000's acoustic-based Telling Stories, which once again contained her signature mix of blues, folk, and country. Longtime fans were pleased with the disc, but it failed to hook new listeners. In a review for the London Daily Mail, Adrian Thrills wrote that "Telling Stories contains four of the finest songs Chapman has penned since her debut's mighty triumvirate." In particular, Thrills mentioned the title track, along with "Less Than Strangers," "It's OK," and "The Only One." While Thrills praised the songwriting, he noted that the album lacked the passion of her previous hits and lamented that Chapman "rarely tampers with her safe, straightforward style."

In 2005 Chapman released Where You Live, yet another disc filled with personal and political ramblings. The album featured "Change," a song about midlife crisis, the scorching diatribe "America," and "Never Yours," a song of unrequited love. One poignant track included "3,000 Miles," where Chapman addressed the incident in Cleveland when she was attacked at 13, and commented on urban poverty and isolation.

Envisioned Bright Future
Chapman was still touring in 2009, treating fans to tracks from her eighth studio album, 2008's Our Bright Future. While the title sounded optimistic, the lyrics were bittersweet, with the title track suggesting that the bright future was in the past. Speaking to the London Guardian's Amy Fleming, Chapman put it this way: "What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak."

During her career, Chapman was hampered by her earlier negative image in the media. "Well, I was so young and inexperienced back then," Chapman told the Mail on Sunday. "Things happened so fast and I wasn't prepared for it. I was shy and uncomfortable, and that made me defensive in some ways. But I think there has been a progression over the years." Some of Chapman's reticence with the media dated back to the childhood incident in Cleveland, where the papers reported she was culpable in the incident. Chapman has loosened up over the years, but she remained tight-lipped about her private life. At one point it was revealed that Chapman was romantically involved with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker in the mid-1990s.

As the first decade of the new century neared an end, Chapman was living in San Francisco enjoying her life as a singer-songwriter. She was still writing songs the same way she began when she penned her hits in the 1980s, where the words and music are written simultaneously. "I write the songs before I go into the studio so by the time I start recording, all the songs are complete and it's just a matter of working on the production and arrangements," she told Polly Weeks of the Belfast Telegraph. "I often write late at night or early in the morning. I'll wake up at three or four in the morning with a really good idea and then start playing guitar and writing songs."

Selected discography
Tracy Chapman, Elektra Records, 1988.
Crossroads, Elektra, 1989.
Matters of the Heart, Elektra, 1992.
New Beginning, Elektra, 1995.
Telling Stories, Elektra, 2000.
Let It Rain, Elektra, 2002.
Where You Live, Atlantic, 2005.
Our Bright Future, Elektra, 2008.

Sources
Periodicals
Belfast Telegraph, November 21, 2008, p. 30.
Birmingham Post, November 7, 2005, p. 13.
Daily Mail (London, England), February 11, 2000, p. 54
Entertainment Weekly, May 1, 1992, p. 52; December 1, 1995, p. 74; April 26, 1996, p. 58.
Knight-Ridder News Service, August 23, 1996.

Mail on Sunday (London, England), August 14, 2005, p. 39 (YOU).
MOJO, January 1996.
Nation, July 6, 1992, p. 30.
Newsweek, July 1, 1996, p. 62.
People, October 16, 1989, p. 19; April 20, 1992, p. 27.
Playboy, February 1990, p. 16.
Rolling Stone, September 22, 1988.
Sunday Mail (South Australia), November 30, 2008, p. 97.
Time, March 12, 1990, p. 70; May 13, 1996, p. 101.

Online
"The Quiet Revolutionary," Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/31/tracy-chapman-women-pop-usa (March 18, 2009).

• Genres: Rock

Biography

Tracy Chapman helped restore singer/songwriters to the spotlight in the '80s. The multi-platinum success of Chapman's eponymous 1988 debut was unexpected, and it had lasting impact. Although Chapman was working from the same confessional singer/songwriter foundation that had been popularized in the '70s, her songs were fresh and powerful, driven by simple melodies and affecting lyrics. At the time of her first album, there were only a handful of artists performing such a style successfully, and her success ushered in a new era of singer/songwriters that lasted well into the '90s. Furthermore, her album helped usher in the era of political correctness -- along with 10,000 Maniacs and R.E.M., Chapman's liberal politics proved enormously influential on American college campuses in the late '80s. Of course, such implications meant that Chapman's subsequent recordings were greeted with mixed reactions, but after several years out of the spotlight, she managed to make a very successful comeback in 1996 with her fourth album, New Beginning, thanks to the Top Ten single "Give Me One Reason."

Raised in a working class neighborhood in Cleveland, OH, Chapman learned how to play guitar as a child, and began to write her own songs shortly afterward. Following high school, she won a minority placement scholarship and decided to attend Tufts University, where she studied anthropology and African studies. While at Tufts, she became fascinated with folk-rock and singer/songwriters, and began performing her own songs at coffeehouses. Eventually, she recorded a set of demos at the college radio station. One of her fellow students, Brian Koppelman, heard Chapman play and recommended her to his father, Charles Koppelman, who ran SBK Publishing. In 1986, she signed with SBK and Koppelman secured a management contract with Elliot Roberts, who had worked with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Roberts and Koppelman helped Chapman sign to Elektra in 1987.

Chapman recorded her debut album with David Kershenbaum, and the resulting eponymous record was released in the spring of 1988. Tracy Chapman was greeted with enthusiastic reviews, and she set out on the road supporting 10,000 Maniacs. Within a few months, she played at the internationally televised concert for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday party, where her performance was greeted with thunderous applause. Soon, the single "Fast Car" began climbing the charts, eventually peaking at number six. The album's sales soared along with the single, and by the end of the year, the record had gone multi-platinum. Early the following year, the record won four Grammys, including Best New Artist.

It was an auspicious beginning to Chapman's career, and it was perhaps inevitable that her second album, 1989's darker, more political Crossroads, wasn't as successful. Although it was well-reviewed, the album wasn't as commercially successful, peaking at number nine and quickly falling down the charts. Following Crossroads, Chapman spent a few years in seclusion, returning in 1992 with Matters of the Heart. The album was greeted with mixed reviews and weak sales, and Chapman had fallen into cult status. Three years later, she returned with New Beginning, which received stronger reviews than its predecessor. The bluesy "Give Me One Reason" was pulled as the first single, and it slowly became a hit, sending the album into the U.S. Top Ten in early 1996. It was a quiet, successful comeback from an artist most observers had already consigned to forever languish in cult status. Telling Stories followed in early 2000. Let It Rain followed two years later. For 2005's Where You Live, Chapman co-produced the album with Tchad Blake. Our Bright Future, co-produced by Chapman and Larry Klein, appeared in 2008. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi

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