Early Life
Joan Armatrading was born in 1950 in Basseterre on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts in 1950 as the third of six children. Her mother was born in Antigua and her father was from Saint Kitts. When she was three, her parents moved with their two eldest boys to Birmingham, England while Joan was sent to live with her grandmother on Antigua. She joined her parents in Brookfields, a district of Birmingham which is now part of Handsworth, in early 1958, at the age of seven. Her father had played in a band in his youth, later forbidding his children from touching his guitar. Armatrading began writing lyrics and music at the age of 14 on a piano that her mother had purchased as "a piece of furniture". Shortly thereafter her mother bought her a £3 guitar from a pawn shop in exchange for two prams, and the younger Armatrading began teaching herself the instrument.
She left school at the age of 15 to support her family, and her first job was at Rabone Chesterman, an engineering tool manufacturer in Hockley, Birmingham. She was released from this job because she brought her guitar to work and played it during tea breaks.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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