Tanya Tucker ~ Delta Dawn (Austin City Limits) 1985

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Tanya Tucker ~ Delta Dawn (Austin City Limits) 1985

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Season 11, Episode # 1105, Aug. 9,1985
From Disc 3 of the 10 DVD Box Set "Austin City Limits Country"
released by Time Life in 2021.

Пікірлер: 11

@freeb1111 6 күн бұрын

Such a bittersweet story about this song: “Delta Dawn” was composed by songwriters Alex Harvey and Larry Collins. The words to the song were reportedly inspired by Harvey’s mother, a woman he described as having “come from the Mississippi Delta and she always lived her life as if she had a suitcase in her hand but nowhere to put it down.” He explained she was a hairdresser in his hometown of Brownsville, Tennessee, and described her as a free spirit, almost childlike. “Folks in a small town don’t always understand people like that,” he added of his mother. “When I was fifteen years old, I was in a band,” his passage in the book read. “We had just won a contest and we were going to be on a TV show in Jackson, Tennessee … My mother said she wanted to go. I told her that I thought she would embarrass me. She drank and sometimes would do things that would make me feel ashamed, so I asked her not to go that night.” When Harvey returned home from the taping, he discovered his mother had died in a car accident when she crashed her vehicle into a tree, something he suspected had been a suicide. Overcome by grief and struck with guilt, music seemed to be young Harvey’s only way of coping. “For me, it was a form of therapy,” he shared. “That was the only way I could work it out.” A decade or so after her death, Harvey was at fellow songwriter Larry Collins’ house late one night with a group of other musicians. Everyone had fallen asleep while Harvey stayed up fiddling with his guitar. “I looked up and I felt as if my mother was in the room,” he said of that moment. “I saw her very clearly. She was in a rocking chair and she was laughing.” That’s when the lines She’s forty-one and her daddy still calls her, ‘baby’/ All the folks around Brownsville say she’s crazy came to him. With those words, he woke Collins and the pair finished the song together in 20 minutes. Harvey explained that that night released him from his guilt over his mother’s passing, saying “I really believe that my mother didn’t come into the room that night to scare me, but to tell me, ‘It’s okay,’ and that she had made her choices in life and it had nothing to do with me. I always felt like that song was a gift to my mother and an apology to her. It was also a way to say ‘thank you’ to my mother for all she did.”