Tracy Chapman just made country music history with ‘Fast Car’ | CPT PPP Coverage

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Tracy Chapman has made country music history.

The reclusive rock star and longtime San Francisco resident became the first Black woman to be the sole writer of a song to top the country charts this week thanks to Luke Combs’s remake of her 1988 song “Fast Car.”

The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart on July 8, an achievement that puts Chapman in an elite group of artists, according to Rolling Stone.

While three other Black women have reached No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart, they did so as co-writers. Allison Randall was the first to accomplish this as a contributor to Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s & OOO’s (An American Girl)” in 1994. In 2021, Ester Dean co-wrote Lady A’s hit “Champagne Night,” and Tayla Parx was part of the team behind Dan + Shay’s “Glad You Exist,” both of which reached the pinnacle of the chart.

Combs’s studio version of “Fast Car,” which appears on his latest album, “Gettin’ Old,” remains faithful to Chapman’s spare original, unlike other versions of the song that have recently appeared, ranging from Jonas Blues’ electronic dance music take to the Black Pumas’ blues rendition. The original version by Chapman, taken from her self-titled debut album, reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988 and earned the singer-songwriter a Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance.

Reflecting on the enduring popularity of “Fast Car,” Combs told Rolling Stone in 2020, “The guitar part on that song is super iconic, and everyone knows the song as soon as you start playing it. They know it, and they sing along. It’s like ‘Free Bird’ or ‘Jolene.’” 

Apart from marking Combs’s 16th No. 1 hit on country radio, the song marks several other chart feats. Billboard reports that it is the first cover of a pop hit to reach No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart in 15 years since Blake Shelton’s rendition of Michael Bublé’s “Home.” Moreover, it is the first time in 24 years that a cover of a song that originally entered the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 has topped the country chart, following Mark Chesnutt’s cover of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” in 1999.

Chapman has not communicated with Combs regarding his cover of “Fast Car,” nor did the famously publicity-shy songwriter reach out to him before the song gained popularity. 

“It was never the goal for it to blow up the way that it did,” Combs told Taste of Country. “You can’t really predict, you know, what’s gonna take off. And then in the age of TikTok, man, things can take off so much faster than ever before. I mean, they can cake off truly overnight.”

In October 2018, Chapman filed a lawsuit against rapper Nicki Minaj for using a substantial sample of another 1988 single “Baby Can I Hold You” in an unreleased track called “Sorry.” The case was ultimately settled out of court for $450,000.

Chapman, who sold 10 million copies of her debut shortly after graduating from Tufts University in Massachusetts, went from playing local coffeehouses to Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday concert at London’s Wembley Arena within a year. Her rapid rise to stardom made her realize the need to step back from the spotlight, she told The Chronicle in a rare interview in 2000.

“There’s a time and place for everything, and my focus is music,” Chapman said. “So that’s what I prefer to spend most of my time doing, and not talk about making music.”

Reach Aidin Vaziri: avaziri@sfchronicle.com