What were you doing on any given September day as a 13-year-old? If you were Tanya Tucker, the correct answer would be “making country music history.”
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Indeed, while the average teenager was sitting at a school desk listening to their teacher, Tucker was cutting records in Nashville, Tennessee. With a husky voice that defied her age, Tucker became one of country music’s youngest superstars with a song about a middle-aged woman from Brownsville who walks downtown, suitcase in hand.
Tanya Tucker Made Country Music History in 1972
Multiple recording artists have cut a version of Larry Collins and Alex Harvey’s early 1970s country tune, “Delta Dawn”. Harvey was the first to release a rendition of the track on his eponymous 1971 album. One year later, a mind-bogglingly young artist and recent signee to Epic Records, Tanya Tucker, cut her own version. This would be the “Delta Dawn” most of us have come to know over the years, and it’s easy to see why.
Despite her young age, Tucker’s surprisingly mature and smoky voice was the perfect vessel for a song about an older woman constantly pining for a different life somewhere else with a “mysterious dark-haired man” who promises the titular character that he’ll “take you to his mansion in the sky.” The song about aging, unrequited love, waywardness, and death was far heavier fare than most teenagers are getting into at thirteen. Nevertheless, Tucker knew right away that she wanted to record the song.
After hearing a version of the track in Nashville producer Billy Sherrill’s office, Tucker immediately said, “Now, that’s my song. The credit I give Billy—and I give him all the credit—is he listened to me. I never, ever recorded a song with him that I didn’t want to record,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with CMT. “He goes, ‘Let’s start out with the chorus, a cappella.’ I didn’t know what a cappella was. So, he told me, and I said, ‘That sounds good to me.’ We went and recorded it the next day, around noon.”
Tucker released her album, Delta Dawn, on September 11, 1972. The album’s title track became an instant success, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, making Tucker one of country music’s youngest Top 10 artists at only 13 years old.
She Didn’t Know Why She Chose It, but She’s Glad She Did
It’s not often we can fully stand by the opinions we had or decisions we made at 13 years old (at least this writer can’t). But Tanya Tucker has always been grateful for the creative vision that allowed her to see, even as a young child, that “Delta Dawn” had tremendous potential. The success of that first chart-topping hit buoyed her throughout the rest of her career, and she still remains grateful for that song decades later.
“I chose that song, and I don’t know why,” Tucker said in a 2015 interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine. “I’ve thought about it and thought about it…I don’t know why I chose it, like I don’t know why all these little kids loved it. To this day, I’ll bet I hear it ten times a day. My mother played that record. We sang it going to school. I grew up with that song, and my mother used to put me to sleep to it. It’s just really strange how a song like that could be so connected to younger kids and older as well. But the younger kids are what you like because they live longer and buy records longer,” Tucker added with a laugh.
Photo by Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
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