The Queen Of My American Songbook
Thursday Thoughts
Last night, Tracy Chapman became the first black person, woman, songwriter, anything, to win “Song of The Year” at the Country Music Awards.
I’d usually use this time to gripe about this moment needing a white man, namely Luke Combs, to garner this milestone, but I’m OK tonight. Copyrights matter and credits matter, and she secured both while maintaining peace, privacy, and a life away from fame.
Fast Car remains a perfect and forever timely broadcast of American life. Both observant and introspective, it’s storytelling with aimless urgency. A foot on the verge of its very first step forward. The backstory of an ending, or the start of a journey we don’t know ever happened. We just had to imagine it did. It’s a song that walks the line between hopelessness and hopefulness, that, depending on your mood, can move between being either the purest love song every heard or the saddest song in the world.
The only bit from her private life I remember was that she was rumored to have dated Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Walker herself has been target of numerous accusations of anti-semitism for her decades-long and very public support of the people of Palestine, including refusal to let her book The Color Purple be published and translated in Hebrew. For her reason, she stated "Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories." She additionally refused to let Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation be shown in South Africa until Apartheid was dismantled. Walker continues to be the target of boycotts, with her speaking engagements continually subjected by protests from zionist groups who target and intimidate apologies and cancellations out of the journalists, organizations, and events that platform her. These tactics have been happening long before many of us realize.
Chapman has never spoken publicly about their relationship, though Walker has: "It was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody's business but ours."
Fair.
That’s all. Today is just a day to cozy up and enjoy Tracy. She is very much alive and well and exceedingly beautiful. I try not to lean so deeply on the nostalgia or the beauty of youth, but here she is delivering a performance of these songs at just 22 years old. Yes, we as women are all more than our 22 year old selves, but our 22 year old selves were not this: