Tanya Tucker on Tour
From the beginning of her career, when she was a teenager who sounded like someone way beyond her years, Tanya Tucker has been blessed with an uncommonly expressive voice. Throughout her artistic evolution over the decades, that's never changed. To this day, when you catch the country legend in concert, you're listening to a singer who can tell a story in song like nobody else. And what's country music about, if not telling stories? Whether she's delivering some of her earliest hits, like "Delta Dawn" and "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)," digging into later material, or changing things up completely with covers of tunes by the likes of the Eagles or Bruce Springsteen, Tucker approaches each performance of every song like it's the most important one of her life — because in that moment, it is.
Tanya Tucker in Concert
Tanya Tucker has blazed a long and singular path in country music, starting in 1972 when the shockingly precocious singer, only 13 years old at the time, debuted with her hit "Delta Dawn" (before Helen Reddy ever recorded it). With a musical maturity that made her sound unquestionably adult, she churned out a string of No. 1 country hits while she was still in her teens, songs like "What's Your Mama's Name" and "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)." And of course the hits kept coming after she moved on to actual adulthood, with Tucker maintaining a presence in the Country Top 10 all the way into the late '90s. She's always had an outlaw attitude that set her apart from the pack — for instance, she released a rock 'n' roll album in 1979, when such things were unheard of for mainstream country stars. So her appeal has lasted, existing outside the constantly changing trends of country. For instance, when she released 2019's While I'm Livin', her first album in a decade, enough people were paying attention to ensure that the record made it into the Top 10 on the Country Album charts.
