12/12/2025
Love me some Joan!
Happy Birthday to guitarist, singer and songwriter Joan Armatrading, born Dec. 9, 1950 on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. She spent the first seven years of her childhood there and on Antigua, before she moved to join her parents who had relocated to Birmingham, England. She began writing poetry and songs as a teenager, and when she received the present of a guitar from her mother, found she was practically inseparable from it. She began performing shows at 16, and her debut album, Whatever's For Us, a collaboration with songwriter Pam Nestor, was released in 1972. Her third album in 1976, self-titled Joan Armatrading, was her first to hit the UK and US charts and would achieve Gold record status--as did her fourth album, Show Some Emotion. Armatrading is a prolific songwriter and was releasing an album nearly every year during the 70s and 80s. Me Myself I, from 1980 was a worldwide Top 10 album, and she was definitely on a roll as this record plus her next two would all go Gold, with her next three going Silver as certified by the British Phonographic Industry. All in all, Armatrading has made 21 studio albums from 1972 to the present, with numerous live and compilation discs, has been nominated for three Grammy awards and has won several others including a BBC Radio Lifetime Achievement award in 2016. Her most recent album, released in 2024 is How Did This Happen and What Does It Now Mean.
If you've not heard her before, this is a good place to start--"Drop The Pilot," one of her 80s hit singles from her 1983 album The Key.
https://youtu.be/_rIOQBc1ee0?si=4iOqpP9xBxR_TyJ8
Photo: Joan Armatrading at The Bottom Line, NYC in 1976, by photographer Richard E. Aaron
