Tracy L. Chapman  

Tracy L. Chapman

Born and raised by her mother in Cleveland, Ohio, she began writing poetry and short stories at an early age. Tracy’s first instrument was a ukulele that her mother bought her at three years old because she recognized that she loved music, and was later stolen by the girl across the street from them. There wasn’t much money in the family but her mother saved money from the household food money to purchase it from a neighborhood store. An academic scholarship sent her to high school in Connecticut, where she played at chapel services, Her mother bought her first guitar when she was away in boarding school when she started playing coffee house at school with a borrowed guitar. Later, the school chaplain Reverend Robert Tate organized a collection to buy her a new guitar. (He was thanked years later in the credits on her first album.) At Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, she studied anthropology and honed her musical skills on the Boston folk circuit, playing guitar and singing on the streets of Harvard Square and performing at local coffeehouses and the campus folk club. By 1987, she had signed to Elektra, a label with a proud singer-songwriter history dating back to the 1960s heyday of the genre. Her self-titled debut album, produced by David Kershenbaum, was released in early 1988 and its warm, passionate and heartfelt songs announced the arrival of a compelling talent. At the time, the record was a breath of fresh air. By the late 1980s, music was dominated by synths and drum machines and the simplicity and sincerity of Chapman’s approach was hugely refreshing. The songs themselves were full of sharp observation, deeply rooted in her personal experience of growing up poor in a working-class community in the inner city. The album met with immediate critical and commercial success, but it was an appearance at the Nelson Mandela 70th-birthday tribute concert at Wembley, London, in June that year that introduced her to a mass global audience. “They didn’t have a slot for me and I was kept waiting,” she recalls. “It was just me and my acoustic guitar and I think they called me three times hoping to put me on while the next act was getting ready.” On each occasion it didn’t happen, and three times she was sent back to the dressing room and told to wait again. Then, just as Stevie Wonder was due to go on in a prime time slot, he told dismayed organizers that his computerized programs had gone missing and he could not appear without them. In a pani

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Tracy L. Chapman »

Follow 0 fans