Back to Basic: Former classmate catches up with Tanya Tucker

Jean Reid Norman

Thursday, April 19, 2001 | 9:23 a.m.

The basics

In the fall of 1972 Basic High School students returned to a brand-new campus built on a big patch of desert on the south edge of Henderson. It was complete with an indoor pool, a state-of-the-art little theater and covered hallways, like a mall.

In the student body was a girl named Tanya Tucker, a button-cute freshman with blond hair and a country hit under her belt.

This is a story I should have written that year, when I was a cub reporter for the Lone Wolf, the student newspaper. But I didn't. And the next year, Tanya was gone, headed for success that I could only follow through newspaper and magazine articles penned by others.

That is my minor claim to fame: I was a classmate of Tanya Tucker. More than 1,200 of us who attended Henderson Junior High School now Burkholder in 1971-72 and Basic High School in 1972-73 can make that claim.

We don't brag about it much, because Henderson has never embraced its hometown girl, if we can even call her that. After all, she was born in Texas, spent most of her childhood in a small southern Arizona town named Willcox, and lived in St. George, Utah, before moving into a mobile home on Navaho Drive.

But she came of age in Henderson: She became the Tanya Tucker here.

Like many relationships during early adolescence, Tanya's with Henderson is complex. And looking back, 25 years after her class graduated, the country star has an attitude familiar to many who return for 20th and 25th class reunions: Life is good, the old hurts aren't worth holding onto, and old friends should be well remembered.

"I learned a lot in a short amount of time," she said in an interview this week. "Some painful, some good, some wonderful."

Tanya moved to Henderson in the eighth grade a tough time for anyone to be the new kid.

In St. George the previous year, she had been popular. She found "the first group of kids I'd ever been in where no one said a word about my discolored teeth," she recalls in her 1997 autobiography, "Nickel Dreams." She had a small group who shared her love of horses, and they would spend hours riding in the nearby hills.

"I'd never had the feeling of belonging that I felt riding through those Utah hills with not one friend but many," she wrote.

But from her earliest memories, she had dreams of being a singing star, and a couple of watershed events in St. George set her on that path irreversibly. They brought her to the Las Vegas bedroom community and in a way, set the stage for the two tough years she endured, her last two of formal education.

Her father, Beau Tucker, had caught her dreams and had been pushing for opportunities for her and her sister, LaCosta, to perform. If only the right person could hear either sing, he was convinced, a record deal would follow, Tanya recalls in her book.

But Beau saw that popularity was distracting Tanya from her goal, and one night he confronted her by asking her to sing for him at 11 p.m. on a school night. "I balked," she writes.

Beau, a laborer who had lived a hardscrabble life, would not be dissuaded. " 'You've got talent to make something of yourself,' he said. 'I'm gonna show you just what kind of a life you could have if you don't make it as a singer. You get yourself outside and weed that garden, because you could wind up doing it for the rest of your life.' "

Tanya stormed to the garden in her nightgown, grabbed a hoe and went to work, unwilling to sing. "I hoed the hell out of that garden," she writes, then relented and sang.

After that, she writes, "I was sure I didn't want to hoe weeds for a living."

Not long after that, Beau scraped together money to make a demo and planned a trip to Los Angeles to talk to record executives.

"Dad stopped at the crossroads on the edge of St. George and asked me if I was really serious," Tanya writes. "Was singing the one thing in this world that I wanted to do? He pointed back toward St. George, which stood for home and school and a normal life, and then pointed toward California, which stood for the unknown. 'What's it going to be, Tanya?' " he asked. " 'We can keep on trying, or go home and you can have this regular life you've started to love so much.' "

"I didn't say anything. I just pointed down the road to Los Angeles."

On to Henderson

So when she moved to Henderson months later, Tanya knew she was going to be a star. And she let her classmates know.

"Here's the thing about Tanya -- she always said she was going to be a star," recalled Patty Stevens Regan, who now lives in the Seattle area. "I couldn't believe it. We'd be rolling our eyes."

"When you are 13, 14 years old and someone tells you they are going to go make a record, you're like, 'Yeah right,' " said Ronda Radley Garland, who still lives in Henderson.

Tanya practiced all the time, friends remember, always the same song, her future hit "Delta Dawn."

"She sang a lot, and mostly in P.E.," said Sharon Roberts Johnson, whom Tanya describes as her best friend from Basic. "When we were outside, because it was nice enough to be outside, she would sing to some of us. A couple of times she'd have a hairbrush with her, and she'd hold the hairbrush like a microphone. And it was just the one song."

At a time when Bread and the Carpenters were big, that one song -- while a great choice for the country charts -- didn't help her standing at Basic.

"Back then country music was pretty out," Regan said. "Nobody listened to country music in our world.

"Some of them liked her, I think, but we imitated her. She had a strong vibrato on that song that was easy to imitate."

The imitation came with a change to the lyrics typical in middle school, one Tanya recalls in her autobiography as hurtful: "Delta Sue, is that poo I smell on you? Can it be you need a bath and shower, too?"

The teasing came to a head in a bathroom one day, Tanya recalls in "Nickel Dreams," when a group of girls forced her to stand on a toilet and sing "Delta Dawn" before school.

"There were so many of them, I had no choice," she writes. "I did as I have done so many times in my life. I just shut down the anger and hurt and sang."

"Junior high is a vicious age, vicious," Regan said. "It's the worst."

Talent emerges

But not everyone made fun of her. Her friends -- Sharon, Ronda and others -- listened as she practiced "Delta Dawn" over and over, wherever she was, and they saw her talent.

John Simmons and his best friend, Alan Garish, listened to the song's 45-rpm single repeatedly at Alan's house, Simmons recalled.

Simmons, a friend a year ahead of Tanya, would visit her and join whatever pickup game the neighbor kids were playing. When Beau Tucker would call Tanya in to practice -- at 5:30; no later than 6 p.m. every night -- Simmons would stay and listen.

"Everybody would think I would be gone, but I'd stick around, slip between the trailers, and listen to her practice," he said. "You knew that she was on her way to the big deal. You could just tell. It was really something."

For her part, Tanya has gained a quarter of a century worth of perspective on those years.

"I feel that those times when I was made fun of, laughed at and belittled was just a part of the process, and maybe even necessary for my eventual success," she said this week.

"My life story is too successful to dwell on any hurtful words or painful memories. I just knew, somehow, that I would take a different path."

String of success

The success has been greater and more enduring than anyone at Basic could have guessed.

In 1972 she won the Academy of Country Music's Most Promising Female Vocalist award. When her classmates were planning for homecoming dates their junior year, Tanya appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. In 1976, while others were planning graduation, Tanya had her first greatest hits album and a Grammy nomination.

After a three-year stint without a record contract, she came back in 1986 with the album, "Girls Like Me," and hit singles, "One Love at a Time" and "Just Another Love." That started a steady roll of yearly albums, each with singles that were hits or got plenty of radio play.

In 1991 she won female vocalist of the year at the Country Music Association Awards on the strength of her album, "What Do I Do With Me," and two years later she won an Academy of Country Music Award for the video of "Two Sparrows in a Hurricane."

In 1994 she performed during the Super Bowl XXVIII halftime show, and in 1996, while her classmates celebrated their 20th reunion, she wrote her autobiography and cut her latest CD, "Complicated," both of which came out the following year.

Amid it all, she had two children, Presley, 11, and Grayson, 9, and claimed a spot as one of America's most visible single mothers.

Since then her professional life has slowed down. She has reduced her concert schedule of up to 250 shows a year to 80 last year, and added a third child to her family.

"I've never worked less dates in a long time, but it doesn't seem like I've slowed down," she said.

She is collaborating, both professionally and personally, with songwriter Jerry Laseter, the father of her 22-month-old daughter, Layla.

"Along with our child, we are definitely making sweet music together, writing, singing, working toward many projects, a new album, videos, a movie of my life, a new show for the road, as well as producing other acts that we both believe in," she said.

"It's a lot to ask of ourselves, keeping our home, our three kids healthy and happy with all their different activities, our individual needs, our careers -- separate and together -- our relationship and just the everyday rigors of life intact and on an even keel. But a lot is something I seem to have always managed to do."

There are wedding plans, she said, "as soon as we see a break in the chaos, because we both want it to be our very special day."

Friends move on

Meanwhile, in Henderson, her friends have gone on with their normal lives.

John Simmons is building supervisor for the city of Henderson, Sharon Johnson is an orthodontist's assistant, Ronda Garland is a dean's secretary at their alma mater and Patty Regan is a nurse.

Other classmates have made their mark as well: freshman class representative Steve Kirk is a Henderson city councilman; senior class vice president Rodney Burr is a municipal judge; star debater Wayne Bartlett Watkins has made a name in regional theater; and prom queen Monica Martinez Simmons, John's wife who was a year ahead of Tanya, is Henderson's city clerk.

Though Tanya didn't make it to either the 10th or 20th reunion, she said she would like to catch up sometime with her old classmates.

"Things change, people change, thoughts change. It'd be nice to see how much we've grown and to share what their choices in life were," she said.

Tanya no longer regrets that she didn't make it to graduation day with those classmates.

"It's just the path that my life was destined for," she said.

"I can't really say or imagine what high school would have been like if I'd stayed. It's just a closed book," she said. "I will say that I don't believe the road to success would have been as early as it was, and may not have come at all in this business. I'd probably have been a vet or something."

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