Fast Cars

The camera sweeps slowly upward from the guitarist’s hands as she strums the first chords of her 1988 anthem for the first time in a long time. We see her face, the audience roars, and she ducks her head, smiling. Maybe we had forgotten how that song so moved us, until a young country singer picked it up last year and returned it to us. In this joining of generations, this unexpected duet, she looks at him, and he looks back with a shy little boy grin, as if he can scarcely believe his luck, singing this song that so obviously means so much to him with the woman, the legend, who wrote it and first recorded it. 

 

The performances during the Grammys this year were especially mighty and moving: from 80-year-old folk icon Joni Mitchell during her Grammy debut to Annie Lennox and the duo Wendy & Lisa as they helped pay homage to musicians lost in the past year. But nothing moved me as much as the Tracy Chapman-Luke Combs duet of Chapman’s searing and poignant “Fast Car.” The story gives us two characters – lovers or maybe just friends – who find themselves facing dangerous situations with gritted teeth and understand they have a choice to make: flee or perish. They choose life – in the form of a fast car that gets them the hell out of town. Leaning on each other for strength and purpose. 

 

As a little kid, I found myself in perilous situations, too, mostly from the upheaval of a family -- the parents, four children -- cleaved six ways by mental illness, and the only fast car I could find was art: drawing, music, reading, writing. I drew and read and wrote and listened to songs about love and the kind of care and justice that didn’t seem to be available to me as a child. Art transported me. 

 

Life got harder for all of us – not just my immediate family – in our small Florida town. In the early- to mid-1970s, police officers stood guard at high schools county-wide to try to keep Black and White students from beating each other senseless. These were the busing days, the forced integration years. I found myself a teenager facing the fear and confusion of too many choices, surrounded by the (mostly) emotional violence of home, and the very real physical violence of school. At 16, I found a friend with a literal fast car and made a run for it.

 

The violence in my high school, however, was nothing new in our part of the world. On Christmas night in 1951, eight years before I was born, former NAACP chapter president Harry Moore, and his wife, Harriette, died following a bomb blast at their home. It was their 25th wedding anniversary. No one was ever charged with the crime, although the KKK was implicated. The assassinations are widely believed to be the first fatalities of civil rights leaders in the earliest days of the freedom fight. It happened 21 miles from where I grew up. No one ever told us about it. 

 

It wasn’t until college that I heard that story, and those were the days when Chapman’s “Fast Car” first filled the air. I heard myself in her lyrics -- but who didn’t?  Who has not had mountains to climb and treacherous rivers to cross? Who has not yearned for a friend, a lover, a family, with whom we feel safe and seen and wanted? 

 

So, fast forward to the 2024 Grammys. As the camera pulls back from Chapman to encompass the full stage and her singing partner, the story’s focus widens, too. We’re hearing Chapman, a Black woman, sing about escape, and we see Combs, a White man, with his quick bashful grin as he looks her way and then picks up the thread of this story about life and death decisions. The duet itself becomes a story about race, ripe with the potential for peace and shared affection. Watching Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs gives me a glimpse of the world I want to live in. It exists only in spare, sporadic moments, and we won’t find it in our lifetimes, but for now, I am grateful for every reminder that such a world is still possible. It’s not surprising that music can be the fast car transporting us there. Together. Leaning on one another.

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2 April 2024