Delta Dawn

This was a song that I always liked, but when I heard the real story, it gutted me. It’s hard to believe Tanya Tucker was only 13 when she recorded it. It was written by Alex Harvey, about his mama, Dawn. Harvey said “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.” The lyrics describe her through the character of “Delta” Dawn who regularly "walks downtown with a suitcase in her hand / looking for a mysterious dark haired man" and she says will be taking her "to his mansion in the sky." It is implied that the man is Alex’s father. Considering Alex was a precocious musical talent, televised at 15, it is reasonable to assume Dawn had a reason to believe Alex would be talented musically, and invested in her son’s musical education from an early age. Perhaps the mysterious stranger was a musician.

She took great pride in Alex, although her social eccentricity and struggles with alcoholism gave Alex conflicted feelings about her. She was a hairdresser in his hometown of Brownsville, TN, and described her as a free spirit, almost childlike. “Folks in a small town don’t always understand people like that.” In today’s world, with heightened sensitivity to mental health issues and alcohol abuse counseling it may have been different. In 1962, in small town eyes, she was a 41 year old single mom who had a one night stand with a man from the city 15 years ago. Her dad still calls her baby, subtly implying that she has never married or left the household. The odds of this man coming back again soon are about the same as that for the Rapture, and the chorus’ refrain of “mansion in the sky” expresses a double meaning of sarcasm perhaps comparing her faith to religious obsession. But Alex was very real, and she treasured him, and Alex knew it. Alex grew up just fine, went to college, got a degree in music, and became a successful musician.

He wrote of the incident that led to the writing of the song. “When I was fifteen years old, I was in a band. We had just won a contest and we were going to be on a TV show in Jackson, Tennessee. My mother said she wanted to go. I told her that I thought she would embarrass me. She drank and sometimes would do things that would make me feel ashamed, so I asked her not to go that night.” She was crushed. When Harvey returned home from the taping, he discovered his mother had died in a car accident. She crashed her vehicle into a tree, and he suspected it had been a suicide.

10 years later, after he facing the guilt of this episode and is own struggle for identity as a man and as a musician, he begins to identify with his mother. He’s not so perfect, and in many ways, his faith in his future music career is about as well grounded in reality as his mother’s dream of a mansion in the sky. He’s thinking about her, and the first two lines of the song pop in his head. He looks up and sees his mama in a rocking chair laughing. “It’s alright” she said. Within an hour the song was written. Harvey described it like automatic writing. The song literally composed itself in the presence of the ghost of his mother.