“A Sunday Kind of Blues - An Interview with Teeny Tucker”

Written By : Nascha Joli

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon when I finally connect with Teeny Tucker, a woman born into blues royalty whose made a lane all her own. She is all blues, all the time. A blues songstress and a songwriter who is as much of a blues historian as she is a blues activist. 

Like most of us during the pandemic, she is staying close to her home in Columbus, Ohio, spending time with family, babysitting her grandchildren, and talking on the phone with friends. In fact, she talked to Mrs. Willie Martin Bland, the widow of the great Bobby “Blue” Bland earlier in the day before I could reach her.  

Being friends with legends in the blues world should not be shocking to anyone who knows Teeny Tucker. Her love of the blues started with her father, Tommy Tucker, a noted blues musician made famous for his 1964 hit record, “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and other songs he’d written over the years.

Teeny admits that she did not understand or recognize her father’s contribution to the blues until after Tommy Tucker passed away. She was too young to see him perform live, most bars and dives wouldn’t let her in because she was underage. 

Born Into Blues Royalty

Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Teeny Tucker says that her father lived in Springfield, Ohio until he moved to New York City for his music career sometime in the Sixties. 

Teeny says that she remembers him coming to visit her in a shiny new convertible Cadillac when she was about eight years old and she thought to herself, “Oooh, my Daddy’s rich!” 

When he took her for a ride, his then-new hit song, “Hi-Heel Sneakers” came on the radio. She didn’t believe him when he told her that it was him singing. 

“I was like, Yeah right! I’m six years old. I’m thinking he’s always playing games with me, so he must be playing with that. So, I’ve really never paid attention to my father being on the radio or anything,” Teeny chuckles as she tells the story.

She didn’t know it then, but Tommy Tucker’s song on the radio was a certified hit. It reached number one on the R&B Billboard chart and the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. Though it was the last number one record for Chess Records, it found continued success as it was later re-recorded by Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and many others. The chord progression found in “Hi-Heel Shoes” went on to influence a generation of rockers and became a rhythmic standard of Jimmy Reed and others. This hit blues record served as one of the seminal influences of later rock and roll and rhythm and blues hits.

“As a kid, if you have a father who is an actor, singer or artist, you don’t really see them as an icon or as somebody that’s big. I think we can’t really wrap our minds around that. But when you get older you appreciate it more. And I think that I really appreciated it more after he was gone,” Teeny explains.

“I’ve never seen him live but I’ve always heard his music. I didn’t grow up with my father but I visited him every summer. I’ve seen him practice for his performances. Because I was so young, they would never let me into any of the places he performed,” she says.

Teeny says that her father Tommy had eight children total by several women but he was a good father who kept in touch with all of them. She saw him whenever he visited Ohio and every summer when she went to visit him in New York.

“My father came from a musical family. He had five sons and three daughters and out of all of his children, I am the only one who sings.”

Teeny was only twenty-one years old when her father died. Just old enough to see him perform live, she was scheduled to see him at a New Year’s Eve show shortly before his death. Newly married, with an eight-month old daughter and five months pregnant with her son, Teeny was visiting her father and other relatives in New Jersey where he had relocated to some years before. 

As fate would have it, Teeny didn’t make it to her father’s performance that night. Her eldest daughter became ill with an ear ache and Teeny spent the evening at a local emergency room. When her father came home later on that night, he took ill. He died a few weeks later. 

The medical report said that he’d gotten poisoned while varnishing the floors of a home he’d purchased in New Jersey and was in the process of renovating. Like many blues artists, Mr. Tucker worked outside the music industry to supplement his income. Teeny’s father had gone into the real estate industry, acting as both a realtor and investor.

While Tommy Tucker’s recording career was short-lived, he had never given up on the blues. He was still writing and recording music on the side until he died. In fact, in the last year of his life he had been writing and recording music with other well-known musicians. Teeny still has the recording reels from those sessions and listens to the transposed copies of these songs on compact disc for inspiration and connection to her late father.

Teeny Finds The Blues

Almost ten years after his death, Teeny Tucker picked up the baton to the blues from her father and began singing and recording the blues. She had always been attracted to music as a kid and knew that she wanted to be a singer at a young age. 

Teeny says that when she first heard Mahalia on the radio, she asked her mother, “Mommy, who is that?!…I just couldn’t believe it. Her voice! It just threw me. I said: That’s what I want to be, a singer like that. So, Mahalia Jackson, was really my first influence as far as female singers.”

Following the inspirational voice of Mahalia, Teeny began singing gospel music. She says she was invited by a German music promoter who worked with her father to come to Germany to learn more about blues music. Ironically it was in Europe that Teeny would learn to hone her skills as a blues vocalist. 

She says that he gave her a tape of blues ladies to listen to in her car and she fell in love with singers like Christine Kittrell, Mavis Staples, Etta James, Koko Taylor, Big Mama Thornton and Big Maybelle.

“I just kept listening to different women singing the blues and the rest is history. I kind of pulled away from gospel and started being more interested in the blues, but not just singing the blues, but the culture.

“I love the culture of it all. I love the idea of how people migrated from the South to be able to perform blues in night clubs and theatres. And you know, I just like the idea of what blues did for the black culture,” Teeny says.

Eventually, she would meet Chrisine Kittrell who also lived in Columbus, and befriended her. Kittrell was a blues and jazz singer from the 1950s and 1960s, known for recording “I’m A Woman” first before it became a hit for Peggy Lee in 1963. Teeny had studied Ms. Kittrell’s music and would eventually turn to her for mentorship in the blues and for the recording industry. 

Teeny says that she always loved traditional blues and studied all of the blues greats, male and female. Vocally, she says Little Milton and Bobby “Blue” Bland inspired her style of singing the most. She gives honorable mentions to Tyrone Davis and Johnnie Taylor.

“I tell people if you really want to listen to how to sing the blues and you want to take yourself to school, pull these guys up, listen to how they articulate the song, how they embody the song, how they perform and project the song and you will begin to learn how to sing the blues.  

Teeny is careful to point out that she’s talking specifically about blues vocal styling. She praises the traditional blues artists Muddy Waters, Johnny B. Hooker, and B.B. King as “the people who paved the way” and who really set the tone for “singing and playing the blues.”

Teeny Sings The Blues

Teeny had always sang songs and written poetry, and soon she would combine the two when she began performing professionally in and recording her own music in the late 1990’s. 

She released her debut album, Tommy’s Girl in 2000, but says it wasn’t until her third album that she started writing some of her own songs. 

“I’ve been writing since I was about thirty-five and I’m just a natural. I’m a natural writer and natural writers make good songwriters.”

Ms. Tucker began her recording career working with Robert Hughes, a blues historian who also acted as her band leader, co-songwriter and record producer for a period of time. Teeny says that he was the one who educated her about making blues music and encouraged her songwriting. 

“I tell you what, he’s educated me a lot about old music,” Teeny said. 

Not only did Hughes help educate Teeny and produce her music, but together the two were selected as finalists in the prestigious International Songwriting Competition (ISC) for their 2013 song “Love Spell.” 

Over the years Teeny Tucker has recorded at least six albums, scored several blues hits and has been nominated several times for “Traditional Blues Female Artist of the Year” from the Blues Foundation of Memphis. She was even named the Best Monterey Bay Blues Artist of the Year in 2010 (an honor given first to Etta James).  But no matter her recognition or success, Teeny says that she loves performing the most.

“You know what my favorite thing about what I do is? When I have a great performance!…I like performing to really touch people’s lives…Being a singer is like the preacher that preaches the sermon, right. If you don’t get anyone or hear anyone to say ‘Amen’ or ‘I hear you!’ then you know that you’re not getting your message across. 

“I just feel like I do it because I’m touching somebody just like the preacher that’s preaching the sermon. If I don’t do that, then what am I standing up here singing for, if I'm not going to touch anybody, or they can't relate to what you're saying, right. I do it to be a blessing, but I also do it to keep the blues alive,” Teeny says.

Teeny’s belting vocals and high energy performances have led her to perform at music festivals all over the world. She’s been featured on the same bill with heavyweights B.B. King, Koko Taylor, Etta James, Buddy Guy, Bobby Rush and so many more.

Blues Legacy & Current State of the Blues 

Ms. Tucker’s passion for keeping the blues and its culture alive is evident in her music and her showmanship but also in her activism for the blues. She has taught and conducted blues educational seminars and workshops all around the world in the thirty plus years she’s dedicated to the blues.

“I think that I serve as an ambassador to the blues. I actually have taught women in blues workshops, in blues festivals, colleges and blues in the schools. I’ve taught little kids as young as preschool about the blues, and then high school students. And then I’ve done workshops for adults to learn the blues,” Teeny says of her work.

Without it, she argues, no other form of American music would exist because “the blues is the root of all of it.”

“This music came from poor people but enriched a lot of lives in the richest nation in the world…And I tell you what, people want to hear it everywhere, especially in Europe,” she says.

I asked Teeny about the current state of the blues and she reflected on its foundation, evolution and its connection to the past. 

“I always look at it like blues music as being the American roots music. And without it, you probably wouldn’t have anything like gospel, soul, country, or none of that.

“I think that every music evolves, okay. And when music evolves and changes, I guess people change with it…I think that for a lot of black people that go away from the blues, it’s because it is something sad to them. It reminds them of places that they were that they don’t want to go back to.

“If you look at it, women were the first ones to record the blues…We didn’t have no therapists, we didn’t have YouTube, or could go lay on the couch and talk to the psychiatrist. We did it through song, we’d go and write a song [about it],” Teeny replied.

She sings a little bit of an old Bessie Smith blues song:

“I can’t sleep at night,

I can’t eat a bite

Because the man I love

He won’t treat me right.”

“When somebody says that to you, you say ‘Wow, she’s thinking the same way I’m thinking. So she’s been mistreated. She can’t get a job somewhere or it’s been hard luck on me as a black woman. All they want me is to be domesticated. They don’t want me to get up and be a performer or think that I can be a doctor or an attorney, you know because we didn’t the opportunity then. I think that’s what the blues was all about back then.’

“But I think blues now—I have an acronym for what I think the blues means now—‘blues lives united in everlasting state’ which means that it should never go away and should be preserved at all costs,” Teeny says.

She sees hope in a new generation of young blues artists, which includes Marquise Knox and Kingfish but says “I wish that more black people would join in and appreciate the culture of the blues, from the beginning to right now.”

Teeny says that with her workshops and seminars, she tries to make her students feel a part of the blues by asking them to share their thoughts and feelings through a blues song. She hopes that by performing and conducting workshops she can reach a new generation of blues fans and potential blues performers.

“We have to learn how to include people that feel excluded or feel that they have never been in touch with the blues. So you got to find ways to actually discuss it and talk about it and get people interested in it,” Teeny suggests.

It seems that Teeny as already thinking about the future of the blues. When asked where she sees the blues ten years from now, Teeny says, “I don’t think the blues will ever die. But I think that in ten years from now, we’re going to have to change our format or our way of making people interested in the blues.”

Teeny is especially interested in getting young people involved in the blues. “We have to find a way to bridge the gap,” she says. She goes on to suggest incorporating the things that young people like and are interested in such as technology, electronics, hair weaves and lash extensions.

Black Lives Matters

Teeny says that she supports the Black Lives Matters movement and was so moved by the death of George Floyd that she wrote a poem about police brutality and the death of black people at the hands of the police. 

Recently, she posted the poem on her website but did not intend to release it at the time of Floyd’s death. Teeny says that she thought that with the video footage, Floyd would receive the justice so many others had been denied. Like so many of us, she is both saddened and disappointed by the lack of justice.

“I’m supportive of any black people that are being mistreated. Since I’m a singer, I was always the one to help start the songs off, especially the civil rights movement songs,” Teeny says before she sings a segment of the protest song “Ain’t Gonna Let Anybody Turn Me Around.”

Ms. Tucker has always been involved in activism since her childhood. In fact, she says that as a little girl she participated in the March on Washington. “I was a little girl about five years old,” she says.

“Yeah, that’s me. I just think that I was born for justice,” she says just before launching into the protest song “Freedom” which she sings and plays for me on her own piano.

Teeny Tucker Today

These days Teeny is still singing the blues and conducting workshops about the blues—the music, the history and its legacy—but she admits that she has taken a break from performing.

Like most artists, performances dried up due to the pandemic  but also because she lost several relatives within the same year. Most devastating were the deaths of her grandfather, her godmother and her beloved son, Boston, who passed away unexpectedly in November 2019 at the age of 37. 

“You know I’ve been doing this for over thirty years,” she says, “and sometimes you have to take a break.” The pandemic helped to make the break easier. 

“I kind of pulled back before the pandemic started. I’ve done a couple little shows. I did a New Years’ Eve show which is a routine show that I do every year, but this year it was a virtual show. I know things are opening up a little now, but I’m kind of pulling back a little bit, because it’s just a lot.”

Teeny is no stranger to loss, a common theme found in blues music. She lost her mother twelve years ago who she says passed away at home in her arms. “She died in my arms. I let her die at home. She didn’t want to go to a hospital. I gave her her wish….It’s a blessing but it’s also bittersweet. It’s something that you will always remember that you held your mother in your arms before she took her last breath. It’s a beautiful thing.

“My father died in 1982 on my birthday, January 22nd, 1982. And I was five months pregnant with my son. And now they are together…I’ve had some troubles, but you triumph over them, you overcome,” she says.

When she isn’t singing or writing songs and poetry, Teeny is painting and teaching herself how to play the piano. She says that she got bored during the quarantine days of the pandemic and decided to try her hand at both. 

(While we were talking on the phone, she was working on one of her many paintings. That is in between the moments that she is singing songs, playing the piano and reciting poems for me.)

“I’ve got over two hundred paintings,” she tells me, “And I probably sold about seventy.”

Teeny says that she started painting as a way to help grieve the loss of her son. “The only way I learned to do art was to get through a really tough grieving period for my son…My daughter bought me a little canvas and some paint. And I took the paint and made a rose for my son…I made a red rose and I put it on Facebook. And everybody was like: Oh my God! Can you make one for me?

“And you know, with so many different mothers that have lost their kids…so I made them all a rose. And then I started doing butterflies. And I just started doing black art, and my art just took off. So, I’ve been doing art for the last seven or eight months,” Teeny says and chuckles with delight.

Fans of Teeny Tucker can breathe a sigh of relief if they think she’s leaving the blues behind. She’s not. In fact, she tells me that in a few days she’ll be traveling to Mississippi to teach another blues workshop.   

Later on in the year she’ll be teaching another at the Mississippi State Valley University B.B. King Festival. She’s also recently completed work on a blues soundtrack with Bobby Rush for a documentary about a Tanzanian woman who was brought here to New Orleans, Louisiana to be a slave and returns home to Tanzania to die. Teeny is singing one of the soundtrack’s main songs, “Take Me Home Today.” She expects that the documentary and soundtrack will be released sometime this year.

Ms. Tucker has also recently collaborated with Walter Trout and his wife Marie on the song, “All Out Of Tears,” inspired by her son’s death. Teeny says that she and Walter saw each other on Beale Street shortly after her son passed and when they spoke about his death, she told him that “her eyes are dry, but her heart keeps crying.” 

Trout was so moved by her words that he had difficulty sleeping that night. The next day, she says his wife called her and told her that he wanted to do something to honor her son, Boston. The end result, “All Out Of Tears,” has now been nominated for Song of the Year by the Blues Foundation in Memphis.

Like most of us, Teeny Tucker has seen her share of the blues and loss in life and during this pandemic. But none of it seems to slow her down. She’s still bluesin’.