Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’ Grammy Duet is why I Love Music

I love music. I mean…I really love music. You may remember last year when I wrote a post about how watching Justina Miles’ ASL translation of Rihanna’s halftime show touched me to my core. In fact, I watched it again a couple times last week. You see, every now and then there is a performance that hits me so hard all I can say is, “That’s why I love music.”

This year’s Grammys had two of those instances with Joni Mitchell’s first Grammy performance and the duet with Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. I chose to focus on the latter because it generated a ton of conversation between my friends and I. In fact, you can listen to an interesting and thought provoking discussion about this duet and the Grammys on The Right Time with Bomani Jones. The duet came about due to the incredible success of Combs’ cover of Fast Car and Tracy Chapman garnering country music awards and other critical accolades more than 30 years after the release of her original hit. Due to the cover introducing people to Chapman’s original, her original track is at 800 million listens and shot up to #1 on iTunes. Let’s hope this outpouring of love for Chapman’s work leads to her putting out a new record…but we can save that for another post.

What I love about it is that this duet made everyone cry and the success of each song speaks to the universality of music and commonalities within the human experience. You have a African-American woman who started dreadlocks at 19 and celebrated her African-American culture at a time when pop music was all pushing to the middle in an attempt to own radio play and a major white male country singer who brings with him a traditional country blues twang. On the surface you would think that they have nothing in common, but Combs singing the cover honestly and from the heart is the key. You see, he used to listen to that song with his dad and it spoke to the marginalisation he was seeing in his community, even though Chapman was speaking from an entirely different perspective referencing her own feelings of marginalisation as an African-American woman.

The fact that both of them can speak honestly about feeling trapped, poor, marginalised and dreaming of an escape is why this song endures and why Chapman is a national treasure. The song itself acts as neutral ground for people of disparate backgrounds to come together under a common experience of poverty, addiction and feeling trapped. When you hear Tracy you can hear her genuine emotion and pain, while also hearing Luke’s honest longing for escape and feeling trapped when he takes over. Fast Car takes on a life of its own as these two immensely talented artists pour their own personal emotions, fears, hopes and dreams into their performance.

Having both Luke and Tracy sing from the heart and honour / respect each other’s interpretation of the song is what made the duet so powerful. It also helped that both of their vocals were perfect and at 60 Tracy Chapman still sounds like she’s 19. It has always interested me in how relatively personal songs like Fast Car could speak to such universal themes that both an African-American woman folk singer and a white male country music star can connect with the track. Not just that, but their shared experience singing the song and love of each other throughout the performance caused it to go viral and will have people going back to that song for another 30 years. The power of music within the human experience is awe inspiring. Man, I love music.