"On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting."

"But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man."

 
Said Holly G, "founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans," quoted in in "Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’/Combs’s remake of Chapman’s 1988 hit now dominates the country charts, renewing difficult conversations about diversity in Nashville" (WaPo). 

[According to] Tanner Davenport, a Nashville native and co-director of the Black Opry: White country singers struck gold this past decade releasing songs heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop, but few Black artists are even signed to major Nashville labels.... 

The immediate success of Combs’s “Fast Car,” Davenport said, “kind of just proves that when you put a White face on Black art, it seems to be consumed a lot easier.... This genre needs to expand their boardrooms and let marginalized people be in these rooms and make a bigger bet on these artists.”...

There are 2 very different issues here. 1. How is the country music genre defined and enforced (and to what extent does it exclude black artists who want to present themselves as within the country genre)? and 2. Should white artists cover songs that were originally written by/for black singers? 

[T]he song has always had a particular significance in the Black and LGBTQ+ communities, Davenport said; the Black Opry performed a group singalong of “Fast Car” when it closed out its first show. (Chapman does not discuss her personal life, but writer Alice Walker has disclosed their relationship, which occurred in the 1990s.) “I think the song in general is pretty reflective for a lot of people who do identify as queer, and also for a person of color — the song almost seems like an anthem for us,” Davenport said. “It’s been pretty monumental in our lives, and I think it made us feel like we weren’t alone.”

So, actually, there are 4 issues here. Take the 2 spelled out above and replace "black" with "LGBTQ+."

Another issue is that there's a big difference between covering a new hit by a black/LGBTQ+ artist and covering an old song like "Fast Car." Tracy Chapman had her big hit 35 years ago. It is vastly in her interest for another artist to have a big hit covering it today. To convince straight white people not to cover the songs of songwriters who are not straight and white is to restrict the income of black/LGBTQ+ songwriters.

The author of the article, Emily Yahr, quotes an English professor who declares that "Fast Car," with its dream of driving a car away from painful circumstances, appeals to a wide audience:

Francesca Royster, author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions” and an English professor at DePaul University, said the song’s story of the narrator feeling trapped and trying to escape is “a really American iconography” about cars holding the promise of freedom. “This is something country music is very invested in, too: invested in, too: the American dream of reinvention and finding happiness after a life of struggle,” Royster said....

And yet: 

... as someone who lived in Oakland, Calif., when “Fast Car” came out and saw how it connected to the queer community, she said, it’s difficult to see the success of Combs’s cover knowing that country music, with its historic emphasis on “tradition,” has generally shied away from highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and their stories — which is all part of the complexity of the current life of the song.

But there's nothing LGBTQ+ about the lyrics of that song. That's why the article has to say "part of the complexity of the current life of the song." Some people who like the original recording have a personal bond with it that connects it to things that drop out of the picture when it's sung by a straight white man. But the song stands apart from the original recording and from the artist most closely associated with it. A great song deserves multiple versions and it would be horribly unfair if black/LGBTQ+ songwriters were put in a separate category and protected from covers. 

CORRECTION: In the first draft of this post, I wrote that the song is "clearly about a woman dissatisfied with a no-good man, just like so many country songs." It was only listening to the Combs version that I realized that "my old man" refers to the singer's father. I noticed that Combs hadn't changed the lyrics to fit the heterosexual man's point of view and wondered whether he was just, as some singers do, adopting the voice of the opposite sex. That seemed interesting, and I paid more attention to the lyrics of Verse 3:

See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with a bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his

At this point, I'm convinced I'm hearing about a sexual relationship. The singer, originally a woman, is unhappy with the man who won't work and doesn't even look good anymore. But then there's this: 

When mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's gotta take care of him"
So I quit school and that's what I did

Oh, it's dad. Deadbeat dad. Bleh. Sure. Leave him. I always thought she was leaving an inadequate sex partner. "My old man"... in my head, those words resonate with Joni Mitchell: 

That's not about daddy.