Tracy Hamlin has performed with famed artists like Gladys Knight, Carlos Santana, Gloria Gaynor, and Peabo Bryson. She’s also performed in 58 countries — and right here in the DMV — belting out songs across a variety of genres. She’s a virtuoso of soul, jazz, dance, and R&B.
When we met, Hamlin was pinning down details for the annual Sweet Jazz Festival, a two-day event that took place at the Washington Dulles Marriott on April 11 and 12. Hamlin founded the festival in 2018 and acts as CEO. Her résumé also includes teaching, songwriting, charitable work, running her own record company, and serving on numerous boards. At the heart of it all is her tireless devotion to music.
Formative Forays
As we chat in the Marriott lobby lounge, it’s clear that Hamlin is a beloved figure here. Various employees make time to greet her and share a hug and a friendly word. Just around the corner from us is the ballroom that will host several hundred festival attendees and more than a dozen performers, including Hamlin herself.
At 58, Hamlin’s looks belie her age. She is chic in a way that lacks pretension.
The singer says she was “bitten by a bug” to be an entertainer at age 5, when she and her three brothers would perform for family and friends in their Baltimore home. Her older brothers were enthralled by The Temptations and The Jackson 5. Those casual gigs led to calls from neighbors who would pay her a few dollars to sing for them.
At age 11, she auditioned with a local R&B band who deemed her “cute” and welcomed her into their enterprise. Then, in middle school, her music teacher invited her to join his band, which took her on weekend performances up and down the East Coast.
Hamlin says she has always embraced moments when “opportunity comes before experience.” Indeed, many of her accomplishments blossomed from on-the-job training, earning her the nickname of “Hustle Woman.”
“The more I saw, the more I desired,” Hamlin says. She points out that her early forays kept her from “running the streets” in an inner-city environment where drugs and other temptations often ensnared the young. She gleaned eye-opening lessons from the biography of the iconic Billie Holiday, a cautionary tale that shed light on drug abuse in the music industry. “I saw how drugs gravely affected her career and sent her life her on a downward spiral,” Hamlin says.
She found inspiration in positive role models, including one who would eventually provide her with a dazzling opportunity. First came Natalie Cole, whose techniques she studied meticulously, and whose book “exposed me to the world of music, both internally and behind the scenes,” she says.
Her all-time favorite singer was Renee Diggs, a member of Starpoint, a popular R&B band out of Annapolis. “I became the vocalist I am today by imitating everything she did,” Hamlin says. By the 1990s, fans around the DMV were calling them twin vocalists.
After Diggs caught wind of the comparison, she phoned Hamlin and invited her to perform background vocals on an upcoming solo album. Hamlin was stunned: “I thought maybe it was a horrible trick that someone was playing on me!”
Even more stunning was an opportunity that arose in 2011, several years after Diggs’ death at age 50 from complications of multiple sclerosis. Hamlin was deeply moved by an invitation to perform Diggs’ vocal parts at a Starpoint reunion concert in Lyon, France. “I could never fill her shoes, but I sure hope I made her proud,” she says.
A Classical Journey
Hamlin’s road to success was paved by the discipline she developed while studying classical music at the Baltimore School for the Arts, and later at the Peabody Preparatory School of Music. While she rolls her eyes in regret over failing to seriously engage with playing her instruments (piano, clarinet, violin), the lessons still proved valuable. “My years of being classically trained provided a foundation that sticks with me,” she says.
Empowering lessons sometimes emerged in unexpected places — like the pageants in which she competed as a young adult. In 1985, she was crowned Miss Baltimore, but recalls that she “didn’t fit into that world.” Her interview “was absolutely horrible,” she says. Fortuitously, the talent portion of the competition trumped other events. Singing became her ticket to winning, an achievement that cemented confidence in her craft and boosted her poise and posture for performing before an audience.
Then came another unlikely opportunity: a 10-year stint as a music teacher at a Maryland school for dyslexic children, starting in 1994. Hamlin was originally hired as a receptionist at the Jemicy School in Owings Mill. After the school learned of her musical prowess, she was offered a position in the music department, even though she lacked professional teaching experience. She spent a summer studying music curriculum design at Towson University, then created a program that allowed kids with disabilities to thrive in musical artistry of all sorts. “That’s when I really understood the impact music can have on people’s lives,” she says.
A Universal Language
Hamlin began performing internationally, both as a band member and soloist, in 2003, traveling to Brazil, Japan, and dozens of other countries. In England, she topped the soul charts more than once. In Russia, her portrait was painted on the side of a concert hall. In St. Lucia, her most frequent destination, she not only performed but also became what she calls an “accidental organizer” of major musical events, a role that returned her to the island more than 60 times over nine years.
While overseas, Hamlin learned to sing in different languages, including German, Italian, and Russian. Music itself became what she calls her “universal language,” allowing her to forge connections with adoring audiences across the globe.
After moving to Loudoun County in 2010, Hamlin began organizing jazz concerts at local sites and eventually launched the Sweet Jazz Festival. She would use the event as a catalyst for spreading the joy of music to underprivileged children via scholarships and other charitable endeavors — what she calls “the proudest work of my life.”
Hamlin had by this time boldly launched her own record label, DMH Records, named for her late mother, Dorothy Marie Hamlin, her earliest source of inspiration. She has since produced six solo albums under the label.
Hamlin credits the title song of one album, “Better Days,” with lifting her up during one of the gravest challenges of her life: a diagnosis of breast cancer in late 2023. She received the dreaded news one morning as she prepared to attend her niece’s wedding. It didn’t stop her from dancing on the occasion, though she kept the news to herself. She spent much of 2024 undergoing treatment and eventually had a double mastectomy.
With characteristic resilience, Hamlin soldiered through, even skipping a week of chemotherapy to pursue one of her most beloved projects: paying an annual visit to underprivileged schools in Alabama during Black History Month. Hamlin teaches lessons on the Civil Rights Movement, and she and her band members perform a triumphant soul and jazz repertoire.
True to form, Hamlin continued to tour and gig throughout much of her treatment, curtailing her schedule only for a time. She found strength in sharing her cancer journey with fans in a poignant speech at last year’s jazz festival. “The hardest part about cancer was finding a decent wig,” she quips.
Reviving the Hustle
Now, with cancer “in the rearview mirror,” Hamlin is back to pursuing her passions in full force. While she recently moved, she maintains strong ties to Loudoun, her home of 15 years.
Like her eclectic musical tastes (her listening favorite is country), her hobbies are varied. They include cooking — mostly Creole-style delights — a love she shares with husband Nat, and one that inspired the pair to open a restaurant called Bayou Nola in Martinsburg, West Virginia. She also competes regularly in the sport of axe-throwing — a fitting pastime for the seemingly invincible “Hustle Woman.”
Never one to sit idle, she’s currently working on a new album and planning a European tour. And as she performs on stages near and far, we can count on one thing: Hamlin will keep pouring her soul into the universal language of music.
Feature image photo of Tracy Hamlin by Crystale Vail Spearman/EYEImagery
This story originally ran in our April Issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
