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. By the late 1980s, music was dominated by synths and drum machines and the simplicity and sincerity of Chapman’s approach was hugely refreshing. At the time, the record was a breath of fresh air.

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. (He was thanked years later in the credits on her first album.)Īt 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.īy 1987, she had signed to Elektra, a label with a proud singer-songwriter history dating back to the 1960s heyday of the genre. Later, the school chaplain Reverend Robert Tate organized a collection to buy her a new guitar. 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.Īn 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. 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. You are also somehow entering a better world in which-for an hour’s worth of music at least-the values of compassion, honesty and humanity are restored to their rightful place in an otherwise increasingly giddy and trivial global culture.īorn and raised by her mother in Cleveland, Ohio, she began writing poetry and short stories at an early age. When you walk out of a record store with a new Tracy Chapman album, you are not merely buying a collection of finely crafted and elegantly executed songs. But she has also become much more than that. As published in the Collection booklet in 2001, this biography is the only authorized by Tracy Chapman.Įver since she burst upon the musical world in 1988 with her warm and magical debut album, Tracy Chapman has been one of our finest contemporary songwriters and a performer of striking originality, grace and charm.

Meaningof tracy chapman the promise