To those who have found true love, only to have had it slip away, there’s perhaps no song more powerful than The Promise by Tracy Chapman, about the eternal hope that one day you’ll be reunited with your soulmate.

I sometimes think only black people can produce music this powerful. The rest of humanity lost that ability tens of thousands of years ago, but blacks preserve it because they were the first to branch off the human evolutionary tree, as Rushton noted.

So turn off the lights, turn up the volume and let this black woman’s talent take you home to the very soul of our collective humanity that began in Mother Africa.

Although the song seems to be about romantic love, it can also be applied to the love a parent has a child.

Darren Graber on youtube writes:

I’m 44 and I have recently been diagnosed with a stage 2 glioma (brain tumor) and have been told that I have perhaps 1 year left, I think this is the saddest song I’ve ever heard, I love this song so much and want it to be played at my funeral but I worry it will upset my daughter to much, it scares me to think of my daughter on her own and that I won’t be here to comfort and support her and it breaks my heart that I will never see my daughter graduate university or that I won’t be there to walk her down the Isle on her wedding day or meet my grand children, I love you Esmee to the moon and back and am so proud of the beautiful, intelligent and courageous young woman you have become, I know that one day (many many) years from now we will meet again, Esmee those day’s will be truly glorious fore we shall walk hand in hand through the fields of paradise as we listen to a choir of angels having shed the sins and struggles we carried for all those years, god bless you all, please be kind to one another and cherish your loved ones because life is just to short and far to precious to waste on bitterness and hate