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When a beloved artist who hasn’t performed live for some time returns to the stage, we often expect him to appear frail, unsteady, and uncomfortable. But during Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, when the camera first pulled away from a tight shot of a woman’s fingers playing a familiar riff on an acoustic guitar and revealed the face of the great and elusive folk singer Tracy Chapman , what you noticed was the joy he radiated. of her face. Her satisfied smile. The unwavering tone and rich firmness of her voice.
It was a genuine moment of warmth and unity, the kind rarely offered these days at televised awards shows—or anything televised, for that matter. Singing her soulful 1988 hit “Fast Car” live for the first time in years, duetting with country star Luke Combs, whose faithful version of the song was one of last year’s defining hits, and enjoying the To the enthusiastic applause of her musical peers, Chapman conveyed the feeling, in the words of her timeless song, that she belonged.
Thirty-five years ago, at the 1989 Grammy Awards, Chapman stood alone onstage and performed a heartbreaking rendition of “Fast Car” accompanied only by her own acoustic guitar.
What made Sunday night’s performance different was not just the time that had passed, or the gray hair that now elegantly frames Chapman’s face. It was the presence of Combs, born a year after that Grammy performance, looking at Chapman with amazed reverence. He seemed to be a stand-in for the many, many people over the years (of all races, genders, and generations) who had heard his deepest desires reflected in this song and wanted to express their gratitude to Chapman.
They traded a few lines and harmonized beautifully in the chorus (his tone opalescent, him providing some spunk), but Combs never upstaged Chapman. He knew that at that moment no one could do it. Something in the way he looked at her said it all: her eyes shone with irrepressible respect. Here was a grown man, a confident stadium-filling performer, visibly shaking at the sight and sound of folk singer Tracy Chapman.
He wasn’t alone in this: The few audience shots during the performance revealed some of music’s biggest stars, including Brandi Carlile, standing excitedly before a standing ovation.
When a cover of a famous song becomes a hit decades after the original’s release, a stylistic reboot is usually necessary for it to resonate with a new generation. But the appeal of Combs’ version, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, came from how closely it stuck to Chapman’s recording. Combs gave the rhythm section a little more arena-rock oomph and added a slight country touch to his phrasing, but that’s about it. It’s a cliché to call a song “timeless,” but here was the proof: “Fast Car” didn’t need any major improvements to become a hit again, more than three decades after its first release.
Still, this revival and the success of Combs’ recording sparked debate over the song’s proper genre. Combs was born in North Carolina and eventually moved to Nashville to begin his music career, and all of the music he had released prior to “Fast Car” had been classified, for chart purposes, as country. That meant that when “Fast Car” won song of the year at the Country Music Association Awards last November, Chapman became the first black songwriter to win that award. This felt less like a cause for celebration than a stark reminder of how few black women get to be considered “country” artists, a genre with a long and complicated racial history. Was “Fast Car” a pop song, as the Grammys had classified it in 1989? Was it a popular song when sung by a black woman and a country song only when sung by a white man?
But the culture wars that divide us so deeply elsewhere seemed, perhaps fleetingly, far away Sunday night.
The song, during Chapman and Combs’ five-minute performance, felt incredibly spacious: larger than the genre’s limitations, welcoming and expansive enough to contain every person it had ever touched, regardless of identity markers. that so often divide us. It was a rare reminder of music’s unique ability to erase external differences. “Fast Car” is about something more internal and universal. It is a song about the desires and needs that make us human: the desire to be happy, to be loved, to be free.