Tracy Chapman’s Black and White World

“The world’s a mess,” says Tracy Chapman flashing a winning smile and then breaking into laughter. The 24-year-old singer-songwriter is well aware of her reputation for seriousness, and she has just stopped herself, nearly breathless, after railing against a catalog of social ills. Chapman, whose powerful debut album, Tracy Chapman, addresses such issues as racism and violence against women, is perfectly capable of laughing at herself. What she is not interested in doing is lightening up her music.

“I didn’t know that you had to have a percentage of humor on every album you put out,” she says, joking that perhaps her next record should be a “comedy album.” “I don’t know that you can necessarily be humorous about some of the issues that I deal with in my songs,” she continues. “I don’t know that it serves them very well to dilute things in that way.”

No need to worry – the 11 songs on Tracy Chapman are as undiluted as they could be. The production is subtle and streamlined, focused unyieldingly on Chapman’s acoustic guitar, her bluesy voice and her carefully wrought tales of characters in contemporary America who seek meaning in the face of society’s fragmentation. Chapman is equally direct about her political beliefs: “Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share/Poor people gonna rise up/And take what’s theirs,” she insists on the album’s opening track, “Talkin’ bout a Revolution.” Sentiments like these have led critics to view Chapman as a bridge between the Eighties folk revival and the more socially conscious folk movement of the Sixties.

That connection was dramatically underscored in early May, when Chapman performed two riveting sets at the Bitter End, on Bleecker Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Though it’s now primarily a showcase club for new, unsigned bands, the Bitter End was a hot spot on the Sixties folk scene, before Chapman was born. Playing alone on that legendary stage for an audience of writers and music bizzers stoked by the buzz her album had generated, Chapman made it clear that she was not easily intimidated. Dressed casually in jeans and a sleeveless light-blue top, she performed with poise, meeting the in crowd’s expectations while in no way pandering to them. Such independence is Tracy Chapman’s style.

The day after the Bitter End shows is rainy and uncharacteristically cool for a spring day in New York, and Chapman sits drinking tea in the hotel suite of her manager, Elliot Roberts. Roberts, who also manages Neil Young and formerly managed Joni Mitchell, is another tie between Chapman and a folk tradition that she acknowledges but doesn’t entirely regard as her own.

Asked if she sees herself as a folk singer, Chapman hesitates before responding. “I guess the answer’s yes and no,” she says, adjusting her compact, muscular body in a gray armchair. “I think what comes to people’s minds is the Anglo-American tradition of the folk singer, and they don’t think about the black roots of folk music. So in that sense, no, I don’t. My influences and my background are different. In some ways, it’s a combination of the black and white folk traditions.”

Chapman grew up in a predominantly black working-class neighborhood in Cleveland and began playing music as a young child, taking clarinet lessons at school and playing the organ in her home. Her parents split up when she was four years old, and she lived with her mother and her older sister, Aneta, to whom Tracy Chapman is dedicated. “There was always lots of music in our house,” Chapman says, citing Betty Wright, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Marvin Gaye and the gospel singers Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar as being among her mother’s favorites. “When I was growing up, I kind of took it for granted. It was funny to go to other people’s houses and find they didn’t have records.” Chapman started writing songs when she was about eight, composing on the organ. “They were pretty terrible songs,” she admits, laughing, “about whatever eight-year-olds write about. You know, the sky…”

The environment in which Chapman grew up also taught her about more than music. “I was very aware of all the struggles my mother was going through, being a single parent and a black woman trying to raise two kids,” she says. “I guess there’s some people who can take all that in and not really look at the bigger picture, not see that there are all these forces in society making things more difficult than they ought to be.”

Chapman’s political awareness deepened when, through a minority-placement program called A Better Chance, she enrolled as a scholarship student at the Wooster School, a small, progressive private school in Danbury, Connecticut. “At that time, I met a lot of students, and also teachers, who were involved in political causes,” Chapman says. “A lot of the people who were teaching us were just a few years out of college, and they were pretty aware. During my first year there was all this talk about the reinstatement of the draft, and people were really focused on that and the whole question of nuclear weapons. So I started to deal with some larger political issues, outside of where I had come from, what I had grown up seeing.”

In addition to getting her political education, Chapman played on the girls’ soccer, basketball and softball teams at Wooster. She also continued writing songs and regularly played at the school’s coffeehouse concerts. “She seemed to have a real good sense of herself musically, and that’s unusual for a high-school-age kid,” says David Douglas, who heads Wooster’s music program and who performed with Chapman several times. “Her influences showed – and perhaps still do – but she had a clear sense of who she was.” 

In Chapman’s sophomore year, the school’s chaplain at the time, the Reverend Robert Tate, took up a collection among students and faculty members to buy her a new guitar – and he is thanked in the acknowledgments on Tracy Chapman. “We knew she would make it somehow, someway,” says Sid Rowell, Wooster’s dean of students, about Chapman. “The only question was when, because she wasn’t the kind of kid who was going to compromise. She was going to have success on her own terms.”