Album Review: Tanya Tucker – My Turn

When Tanya Tucker convincingly declares “I don’t let no man tie me down” on her new covers album My Turn, it is both a jaunty take on Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever” and a summation of the record’s successful premise: Even while tackling some of country music’s most legendary male artists’ highly regarded songs, Tucker doesn’t hold back from injecting these classic tunes with her own brand of throaty, playful country music.

Although that declaration comes in the album’s twelfth and final track, Tucker proves this point on each song leading up to the end: From Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” to Lefty Frizzell’s “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” My Turn pulls together an unusual blend of Tex-Mex polkas, romantic ballads and Bakersfield standards unified by one thing: a voice that’s as gritty, dirty and dangerous as any honky tonk bar fight.

Tucker credits the inception of the album to her late father, Beau. In the album’s liner notes, author Colin Escott recounts an early exchange Tucker recalls having her dad: “’Back when I was starting out, my Dad would tell me, … ‘You have two strikes against you. First, you’re a girl. Second, you’re a young girl. If you’re gonna make ‘em believe it, you’re gonna have to put twice as much feelin’ in it. Girl, you can’t just sing a country song, you gotta put your heart and soul into it.’”

Heart and soul has never been lacking in Tucker’s songs, and the album’s best tracks, “Walk Through This World With Me” and “Ramblin’ Fever,” showcase those qualities in two very different ways. The first, a tender love song that became a number one hit for George Jones in 1967, doesn’t stray far from the Possum’s version but benefits from Tucker’s understated delivery. While missing Jones’ unique phrasing, her performance and the accompanying steel guitar mesh well with the tune’s quiet yearning.

“Ramblin’ Fever,” on the other hand, showcases Tucker’s sass and makes a nod to her infamous past. It takes a special character to pull off one of the Hag’s most bad-ass lyrical lines, but Tucker sneers ”If someone said I ever gave a damn/Well they damn sure told you wrong” in a way only a female member of the Outlaw movement dubbed the “Texas Tornado” could pull off.

Tucker sings Buck Owen’s hit “Love’s Gonna Live Here Again,” “Oh, Lonesome Me,” popularized by Don Gibson, and Wynn Stewart’s “Big, Big Love” with similar aplomb, but slips on some of the album’s better known material. “Lovesick Blues,” a song intrinsically tied to Hank Williams Sr. despite the fact it originated as a vaudeville tune of the 1920s, suffers from the Covers Album Curse: Tucker’s version doesn’t differentiate itself and expectedly falls short of the glorified original. Her take on the Faron Young hit “Wine Me Up” suffers a similar fate.

Despite those missteps, Tucker’s unique, earthy voice shines on My Turn. While the album shares tracks with similar covers albums from Martina McBride, whose 2005 Timeless suffered from a lack of editing, and Patty Loveless (who won critics over with last year’s Sleepless Nights), Tucker brings an authenticity to these songs that stems from the fact that although she’s tackling songs from an important historical place in country music, she herself is firmly a part of that history as well. Standing the test of time, the songs themselves are the true stars here, but Tucker is the thing that makes them shine again.