Tanya Tucker

Tanya Tucker’s country music career is a bucking horse. No matter how much it tries to throw her off, she manages to hang on. Tucker came roaring out of the chute five decades ago with the number one hit “Delta Dawn” at just 13 years old. Tucker’s gritty, husky yet radio friendly voice kept her on top through the ’70s and into the late ’80s with a string of hit albums and singles like “Will You Lay with Me (in a Field of Stone).” She scored massive success while remaining one of few women to join Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the outlaw country club. She was also a self-acknowledged hell raiser, living a volatile life soaked in sex, drug, and rock and roll. By the mid-’80s, the hits stopped and she ended up in rehab. Tucker emerged healthy but lived mostly out of the spotlight until 2019. That’s when celebrated singer songwriter-producer Brandi Carlile sparked a career renaissance. She singled out Tucker as an almost forgotten mega-influence on women in country music and proclaimed her a personal hero and country music superhero. That spawned a Carlile-Tucker collaboration, Tucker’s first album of new material in almost 20 years – While I’m Livin’ – a soul baring, uncharacteristically vulnerable tour de force, based on Tucker’s tumultuous life with songs of regret, defiance, love and mortality. It provided her with two Grammys, landed on a number of top album lists for 2019 AND earned her an induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame on April 3! Tanya Tucker rides again.