Hearing Together? A Listening Across the Lines of Tracy Chapman’s Crossroads

Abstract

In this cowritten piece, we draw on the first song of Tracy Chapman’s Crossroads, her eponymous album released in 1989, to situate our reading of Tracy Chapman’s life oeuvre as a critical engagement with the concept-as-form that is the crossroads. We demonstrate that her work is imbued by an Africana-informed understanding of the crossroads. In its form and content, our piece wades through various significations of crossroads. Similarly, our authorial voices, both in the singular and in the plural, are met by the reader through the piece as they diverge and intersect, harmonize and solo, coax and interpellate. The notions of crossroads that we mobilize are directly informed by a Legba-Èṣù intellectualism, alongside LGBTQI and Black feminist thought. Both our realm and method of study is one that deliberately perceives “in the space between” Tracy Chapman’s lyrics, music, and presence, a path into our respective lives. In the act of writing, we uncover this untold text, composed of these lifelines, and account for how Chapman’s work has affected our life choices, research, and relationship to each other as scholars-in-care.