I’ve always liked this song and Tanya’s scratchy voice. Helen Reddy did a fine version of this also but I’ll take this treatment. It is the version I grew up with…I’ve always been a fan of Tanya Tucker.
When I was a senior in high school I had a job at a place called Tuckahoe Farms. It was Tanya’s farm but she had sold it by the time I worked there. They raised thoroughbred racing horses and it was huge. I was always hoping she would come back to visit but she never did.
It was written by former rockabilly star Larry Collins and country and western songwriter Alex Harvey. It was first recorded by Harvey in 1972. Tracy Nelson and Bette Midler put the song in their live repertoire before it became a country hit for 13-year-old Tanya. The melody and chorus are virtually identical to the Amazing Grace
Harvey says the tune is really about his mother, a heavy drinker who died in an apparent suicide by crashing into a tree when the songwriter was a teen. Harvey had just returned from a TV gig with his band…he had asked his mother not to go, worried she would embarrass him by drinking too much and making a spectacle. The guilt over his mother’s death stuck with him for years. A decade later, he was hanging out at Larry Collins’ house with a group of country musicians. Everyone fell asleep except for Harvey, who stayed up strumming his guitar. That’s when he saw his mother.
Alex Harvey: “I looked up and I felt as if my mother was in the room. I saw her very clearly. She was in a rocking chair and she was laughing,” he recalled. “My mother had 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. She was a hairdresser in Brownsville. She was very free-spirited, and folks in a small town don’t always understand people like that. She never really grew up.”
“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.”
The song peaked at #6 on the Country Charts, #3 in Canada, and #72 on the Billboard 100 in 1972.
Helen Reddy would take the song to #1 on the Billboard 100 in 1973.
Barbra Streisand passed on the song after the backing track had been recorded by her producer without her prior knowledge.
Delta Dawn
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
She’s forty-one and her daddy still calls her “baby”
All the folks around Brownsville say she’s crazy
‘Cause she walks dowtown with a suitcase in her hand
Looking for a mysterious dark-haired man
In her younger days they called her Delta Dawn
Prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on
Then a man of low degree stood by her side
And promised her he’d take her for his bride
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
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