Luke Combs' cover of Tracy Chapman's 1988 classic "Fast Car" has surpassed the original on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Released as the second single off Combs' latest album Gettin' Old, the song jumped to the No. 4 spot on the Hot 100 after spending 11 weeks on the chart. The 33-year-old's cover also snagged him the No. 2 spot on the Hot Country Songs chart. Combs' chart victory comes 35 years after the Tracy Chapman original dropped as the lead single of her 1988 self-titled debut album and reached No. 6 on the Hot 100.
The 1988 version was a hit, receiving three nominations at the 32nd Annual Grammy Awards including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, the latter of which she took the trophy for. It was also nominated for Best Female Video at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards. The song is a tender ballad where Chapman tells the story of a poor woman with an aging, alcoholic father whose wife left him, forcing her to to drop out of school, work a minimum wage job, and live in a homeless shelter. She dreams of escaping the cycles of poverty by hopping in her lover's fast car.
Due to the legacy of the original, fans on Twitter expressed how unhappy they were with Combs passing Chapman on the Billboard Hot 100.
"Original will always be better," one fan wrote, while another said, "I think I just threw up everywhere."
A third person tweeted, "I hope Tracy Chapman is getting ALL OF THE ROYALTIES." Chapman is listed as the songwriter in the album's credits.
In a recent interview with Music Mayhem, Combs revealed he's a huge fan of the record. According to the 33-year-old, Chapman's original was his "first favorite song probably ever," which led to him covering it on his new album.
"I remember listening to that song with my dad in his truck when I was probably four years old," Combs said. "He had a cassette, a tape of it, and we had this old brown camper top F-150. We rode around that thing, and he had a tape cassette player in there, and I have the original cassette—my dad brought it to me a couple of years ago… I have the one, and I have it in my shop."
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