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Delta Dawn, 1972
Written by Alex Harvey and Larry Collins
Between 1972 and 1973, three talented divas had hits with this song: Bette Midler, Helen Reddy, and Tucker. The song has a grim history. Alex Harvey said he wrote the song about his mother, who was an alcoholic and lived "as if she had a suitcase in her hand but nowhere to put it down." Ten years before Harvey wrote the song, he was performing but told his mother not to come, fearing she'd get drunk and embarrass him. That night she died in a car crash (some sources say suicide). For years Harvey suffered from guilt over the incident, until a cathartic incident the night he wrote the song. The title character is a faded former Southern belle who remains obsessed with the long-ago memory of a suitor who jilted her: "She's forty-one, and her daddy still calls her baby / All the folks around Brownsville say she's crazy." Tucker begins with the chorus, unaccompanied except by gospel-style backing vocals, giving the song an eerie, Southern Gothic feel right from the start.
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