Homefires: Southern Music XIV

[Booted back to the top for the write-up.]

Two "explosive" singers who made both the pop and country charts.

To all you demons from hell who constantly thwart me on my path to being proclaimed the all-knowing Southern music gurette: I will listen to the gears in your brains grind and I will laugh.

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I'll add another clue: each is mentioned by name in other people's hit songs -- one song is Rock, the other Country.

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Ritchie has correctly guessed one of them as being Tanya Tucker, whose album "TNT" caused a ruckus, who has had songs on both charts, and who is mentioned by name in Gretchen Wilson's chart-topper "Redneck Woman."

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OK, one last bit of help for the other one: this singer also has two connections with Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page played on one of this singer's albums, and they're both in the Rock and Roll HOF.

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This is the last clue before declaring my (partial) victory: Before Patsy Cline could even think about cross-over hits, this singer had already done it; and this singer is not only in the Rock and Roll HOF, but the Country Music HOF, and the Rockabilly HOF as well.

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Hallelujah, Scott Chaffin of The Fat Guy correctly guessed Brenda Lee, the "Little Miss Dynamite," cross-over queen extraordinaire, muse of Golden Earring, employer of Jimmy Page, and inductee of three different halls of fame.

Good job, Ritchie and Scott!

This write-up ended up being a whole lot of work, so I'm probably going to scale back our little contests from now on. Plus, you bastards don't comment enough when I opine on political matters.

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Although TNT is supposed to be more stable than dynamite, in the case of wild child Tanya Tucker and the steady Brenda Lee, it’s the opposite. Both of these famous “little girls with big voices” had songs in the top ten by the time they were 13 years old, and long successful careers afterward; but Lee's and Tucker's lives off the stage are quite different.

Brenda Lee, the 4'11" “Little Miss Dynamite,” was born in 1944 in Atlanta and started her career at seven years of age. After years on radio and television, she was signed by Decca in 1956. She had the luck to be put with producer Owen Bradley who oversaw almost all her hits. Her first release, "One Step at a Time," charted for both Rock and Roll and Country, and she immediately began touring internationally. She later hit her stride with songs like "Dynamite," "I'm Sorry," and the perennial favorite "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." On the pop charts, she had two No. 1's ("I'm Sorry" and "I Want to Be Wanted"), four Top 5s and five Top 10s. Her 1964 hit "Is It True?" was recorded in London and features a young studio musician named Jimmy Page on guitar. Her last hurrah for the pop music market was 1966's "Coming on Strong," which will make the classic Golden Earring song "Radar Love" now make a whole lot more sense when you hear it. For the 60's alone, her songs reached the various Billboard charts fifty-five times.
Brenda Lee was very fortunate both in her own temperment and with the people who handled her career. She was able to have a long, successful, lucrative career as well as a very happy personal life. As a teen idol in 1963, she married Ronnie Shacklett, a union that lasts to this day.
She moved over to strictly Country music in 1973 and had nine more Top 10s before retiring.
She spends her time these days doing philanthropic work in Nashville and generally being a living legend.
Brenda Lee is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

The Texas-born Tanya Tucker was given some of the best Country songs written to match her amazing voice, if not her age. Her formal schooling ended in middle school with the success of her first recording,"Delta Dawn," when a large group of students forced her into a bathroom and made her stand up on a toilet and sing it for them. But if anyone wants to talk about the phenomena of singing Lolitas like Britney Spears, they need to take a look at Tanya’s early hits. The world-weary voice you heard singing “Blood Red and Going Down,” a song about a girl going with her father to hunt down and kill her cheating mother, was sung by a 14-year-old:

We searched in every bar room, an' honky-tonk as well.
An' finally Daddy found them, but Lord, you know, the rest is hard to tell.
He sent me out to wait, but scared, I looked back through the door.
An' Daddy left them both soakin' up the sawdust on the floor.

And as a 15-year-old, her next number one hit was the David Allen Coe penned "Would You Lay with Me in a Field of Stones." Yikes.

Tanya had a string of Country Top 10s and Number 1's during the 1970's (including "What's Your Mama's Name"), some of which also made their way over to Rock stations and onto the Pop charts. As an aside, I keep running into people who've never listened to Country radio, but they can all sing a Tanya Tucker song or two.

Tanya was the original redneck woman. She had been visiting rock stations and planning a rock and roll crossover long before 1978’s TNT came along and shocked not just her Country audience with its Rock sound, but just about everybody who owned a pair of eyeballs with the lurid cover and gatefold. People had no idea the girl was that...wild. If you’ve never listened to TNT, do yourself a favor and check out the clips. It’s very good, especially her covers of “Not Fade Away” and “Angel from Montgomery." The former stands up to the cover done by the Rolling Stones and the latter outdoes the famous Bonnie Raitt cover. The last song on the album is not Rock at all, but pure Country: "Texas (When I Die.) It went to number one on the country charts and and has become a classic.

For some time after this, it seems she was more often in the tabloids than on the charts, and she had the ignomy of being booed off the stage of the Grand Ol' Opry when she tried to perform a Rock number there. She restormed the Country scene with 1986's Girls Like Me, which gave her four Top 10s, and sealed the deal in 1988 with an additional three Number 1's ("I Won't Take Less Than Your Love," "If It Don't Come Easy" and "Strong Enough to Bend.") Then she headed off to rehab for alcohol and cocaine addiction. When she later refused to name the father of the first of her illegitimate children, one radio station had a running gag for its commuting male listeners to honk if he was the baby's father.

Fulfilling the promise of her 1972 Newcomer of the Year award, in 1991 she was the Country Music Association's Female Vocalist of the Year. During the 1990's she had an additional eight Top 10 songs.

Judging from her book, Tanya is at heart a big ol' slut; but she's a great singer who’s given us many songs that have stood the test the time. She's still out there performing today, and lately can be seen in Gretchen Wilson's video for "Redneck Woman" when Gretchen sings the line "I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song."

I would highly recommend going to Itunes or Amazon and getting a greatest hits compilation that covers her best work over the decades and across all her different record labels, along with TNT, which isn't available on Itunes.

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Previous postings:
Homefires: Southern Music XIII
Homefires: Southern Music XII
Homefires: Southern Music XI
Homefires: Southern Music X
Homefires: Southern Music IX
Homefires: Southern Music VIII
Homefires: Southern Music VII
Homefires: Southern Music VI
Homefires: Southern Music V
Homefires: Southern Music IV
Homefires: Southern Music III
Homefires: Southern Music II
Homefires: Southern Music