At that point I wasn ’t really listening to that much music at all, except what my parents were listening to, or my sister. My mother has a beautiful voice, as does my sister. She told Washington Post writer Richard Harrington: “I ’ve been singing ever since I was a child.
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While still in grade school Chapman began to teach herself how to play the guitar. At an early age she learned to sing, play the clarinet and organ, and compose simple songs that she sang with her sister, Aneta. Chapman ’s parents divorced when she was four years old, and she grew up with her mother and older sister in a largely black middle-class neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Though she is a relative newcomer to the folk music circuit, Chapman has always made music an important part of her life.
As Steve Pond of Rolling Stone noted, Chapman ’s voice “is the sound of a smart black woman growing up in the city with her eyes wide open. When Chapman takes the stage sporting short dreadlocks, blue jeans, and a turtleneck sweater, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar, listeners lean forward to hear her husky contralto pour forth poignant reflections on contemporary urban life. In an era when the label folksinger-songwriter does little to guarantee success, Tracy Chapman has seen her dreams come true.