Ira Tucker, a little man with a giant vocal range and acrobatic stage antics who as lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds helped propel gospel music toward a harder-edged, more emotive style, died on Tuesday in Philadelphia. He was 83.
Ira Tucker, far left, joined the Dixie Hummingbirds as a teenager. The group performed at Symphony Space in 1995, above, with Carl Davis, second from left, Paul Owens and Howard Carroll.
The cause was heart failure, his son, Ira Jr., said, adding that he had earlier suffered two major heart attacks.
According to publicity material from 1950, Mr. Tucker joined what became one of the longest-lasting groups in gospel music when he was 14. Other sources say he joined in 1938 at 13. In any case, he never left.
At its peak in the 1940s and ’50s, the group was one of gospel’s most popular and innovative, using shouting lead parts and walking basslines in songs like “Thank You for One More Day,” “Trouble in My Way” and “Bedside of a Neighbor.” The back-and-forth singingof Mr. Tucker and another tenor, James Walker, is legendary.
In the 1970s the Hummingbirds attained a new and different sort of popularity when they backed up Paul Simon on his hit “Loves Me Like a Rock,” then recorded the same tune themselves and won a Grammy.
Mr. Tucker was a tenor when he started, moved on to baritone and sometimes eased into a rumbling bass. His scream, though, was his defining characteristic: it originated far back in this throat and issued forth at a high register in perfect pitch. He then returned to the baritone range without missing a beat or lyric.
Mr. Tucker added fire to the group’s performances. With a style borrowed from Southern preachers, he wailed, hollered and gesticulated in what today sounds like a precursor to James Brown.
It is hard to gauge how much influence one musician truly has on another, but many articles suggest that Mr. Tucker’s highly stylized singing may have inspired Jackie Wilson, Stevie Wonder, the Drifters, Hank Ballard and the Temptations.
Mr. Tucker had no doubt of his power to inspire. His son remembered him recently listening to a Sly Stone record and smiling broadly at an idiosyncratic inflection. “They heard my old records,” he said.
Anthony Heilbut, an author, producer and expert on gospel and other music, called Mr. Tucker “the presiding intelligence” of gospel music.
Jerry Zolten, an associate professor at Penn State Altoona and author of a book on the Hummingbirds, termed Mr. Tucker “one of the top echelon of gospel lead vocalists who inspired others to sing like him.”
Aside from Michael Jackson, few performers showed as much eagerness to emulate the way Mr. Tucker flung himself from the stage, ripped off his coat, ran down the aisles and finally wilted to his knees in prayer.
“I was blessed,” Mr. Tucker said in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune in 2004. “I never did hurt myself doing it.”
Ira B. Tucker was born on May 17, 1925, in Spartanburg, S.C., with a middle initial that stood for nothing. He sang at local tea parties, and at 13 or 14 he approached James Davis, who had started the group that became the Hummingbirds in Greenville, S.C., in 1928 when he was 12. Mr. Tucker told Mr. Davis that he would walk the 29 miles back to Spartanburg if he failed the audition.
“I’ve beenwith them ever since,” he said in an interview with The Independent Weekly of Durham, N.C. At the beginning he made $3 or $4 a week.
Mr. Heilbut disputed reports that Mr. Tucker made records in 1939. He said that the first performance in which Mr. Tucker could be heard as an individual came in 1944, on a record called “Book of the Seven Seals.” (The record labeled it “Seven Seas.”)
Calling Mr. Tucker’s singing suave and elegant, Mr. Heilbut marveled, “He’s about ready to be Billy Eckstine,” referring to the ballad singer and bandleader.
In 1942 the group was featured at the New York nightclub Cafe Society, where Lester Young, the saxophonist, was also playing. A decade later the group performed regularly at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Their appearance at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival was another high mark.
The Hummingbirds recorded most prolifically and successfully in the 1950s, for Peacock Records. Their Peacock songs included “Let’s Go Out to the Program” and “In the Morning.” In 2002 an album including several songs by the Hummingbirds, a compilation of gospel music by Thomas A. Dorsey and others, was the first gospel album to be placed on the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
In addition to his son, who lives in Deptford, N.J., Mr. Tucker is survived by his wife of 66 years, the former Louise Eleanor Archie; his sisters Sundray Tucker of Philadelphia, who sings and writes songs under the name Cindy Scott, and Lynda Laurence of Los Angeles, a post-Diana Ross member of the Supremes; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
The Dixie Hummingbirds are scheduled to perform at the Prospect Park Bandshell on Thursday night at 7:30 as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn! series. Mr. Tucker’s son said that they still planned to appear.
The Hummingbirds are known for a joyful sound that adds humor to gospel. Their hit “Christian Automobile” sounds like a car shifting gears and climbing a heavenly hill.
The day before he died, his son said, Mr. Tucker tried to sing and could not. So he said he was going to switch careers and become a comedian, and spent the rest of the day cracking jokes.
- General News
Mr. Ira Tucker, lead singer of Philadelphia Famous Dixie Hummingbirds since 1938, died this morning at 10:10 AM. He recently celebrated his 83rd birthday. Mr. Tucker joined the Dixie Hummingbirds in 1938 in South Carolina. The group itself was formed in 1928. The group moved to Philadelphia in 1942 to do a program on WCAU. Mr. Tucker was on of the most prolific hard gospel singers in history. He influenced many gospel and secular performers such as The Temptations, Bobby Blue Bland, and Stevie Wonder to name a fraction.
Read more at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dixie_Hummingbirds
One of Mr. Tucker's last performances was on my radio show, The Gospel Train, on WRDV-FM on January 8, 2008. Here is link to the pictures:
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