Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading is born in Basseterre, Saint Kitts, later becoming a pioneering British singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading was born on 9 December 1950 in Basseterre, on the island of Saint Kitts (then part of the British colony of Saint Kitts and Nevis). She was the third of six children in her family.
In the mid-1950s, as part of the wave of Caribbean migration to Britain, Joan's parents relocated to England, and she followed with some of her siblings in 1958, eventually settling in Birmingham. Growing up in a working-class immigrant household, she developed an early love of music, teaching herself piano and guitar as a teenager after her mother acquired two pawned guitars.
This early life, shaped by migration, hardship, and self-taught musicianship, would form the foundation for a career that broke significant barriers for Black women in British popular music. Armatrading would go on to become one of the most influential and enduring singer-songwriters of her generation, known for her distinctive voice, intricate guitar work, and deeply personal songwriting that resisted easy categorization by genre.
Her birth in the Caribbean and upbringing in post-war industrial Birmingham gave her a unique vantage point from which she would eventually reshape ideas of who could be a successful singer-songwriter in the United Kingdom.
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