Free Republic

On Wednesday, Luke Combs' cover of the song "Fast Car" won song of the year at the Country Music Association awards – but singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, who first released the song in 1988, took home the award. With the win – a whopping 35 years after the song was released – Chapman became the first Black songwriter to win the song of the year prize at the CMAs.

The year 1988 feels like a very long time ago to anyone who remembers it, and ancient history to anyone who doesn’t. I turned 20 halfway through it. So I’m afraid whatever travails and traumas I was undergoing have now been blotted out by the middle-aged person’s rose-tinted remembrance of being young. The grass was greener then, my memory tells me, unreliably. One recollection that I can confirm with the aid of historical evidence is that ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman was everywhere. I heard it in seedy gay bars, at civil-service leaving dos, at family barbecues. It is one...

How's this for a fake controversy generated by wokester identity-politics fanatics? A top country music star named Luke Combs pulled in a number one hit by singing the 1988 song of a black female folk singer named Tracy Chapman, and instead of celebrate that happy revival,, the radical left is out complaining, True to form, the Washington Post has created a fake controversy by quoting a malcontent:To quite a few people, this is cause for yet another celebration in Combs’s whirlwind journey as the genre’s reigning megastar with 16 consecutive No. 1 hits. But it has also prompted a wave...

Luke Combs - Fast Car (Lyrics)

I don't want to completely stick my neck out on this, because when you hope something is true, it clouds your judgemenet (as Dan Rather has found out!)But it appears to me that tickets are available at all the gigs for the "swing states" pro-Kerry/anti-Bush tour. Curiously, New York and New York have not been added to this "swing states" tour. Odd. Now, this is not 1980, but it seems even the Springsteen shows still have tickets available. A bad sign for the left?

Ben & Jerry's "One World One Heart Festival" scheduled this weekend at the original 1969 Woodstock concert site has been canceled.Tracy Chapman and LeAnn Rimes had been scheduled to headline the festival, slated for Saturday and Sunday at the former farm, now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 80 miles northwest of New York City. "An economic downturn coupled with an unexpected slump in the music industry" forced cancellation of this year's event, the company's Web site said. Only 1,000 of the 30,000 tickets had been sold, USA Today reported Wednesday.Ben & Jerry's said automatic refunds would be provided.