I love Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” When I first heard Chapman’s original, it knocked me over—a song about a poor black kid from a broken family desperate to “belong” and desperate to be “someone.” I was an alcoholic poor reservation Indian college boy washing dishes and delivering pizzas who’d just discovered that his lifetime calling was poetry. Yeah, in a capitalist society, the poor boy chose to become a poet. Crazy how well that worked out but it wasn’t supposed to! “Fast Car” felt like it was singing my autobiography. Now there will be a lot of country music kids, a lot of poor white kids, who’ll see themselves in Luke Combs’ cover. Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was always a working class ballad and it’s found a whole new generation of working class kids. Awesome.