By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2008
Ira B. Tucker, lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, performed a
style of gospel music that erased boundaries between music and
movement, praise and performance, style and spirit.
For 70 years Tucker and the Hummingbirds gave high-energy, emotion-
drenched shows designed to please the Lord and wow audiences.
The group influenced a long list of R & B artists and could have
crossed over from gospel to secular music. But that was one boundary
Tucker and the group were not willing to erase.
"I was in a record executive's office with $44 in my pocket," Tucker
once said. "And he was offering me $10,000 to sing rhythm and blues.
But we turned it down because we started in the church, and we had
more respect for God than that."
Tucker died of heart failure Tuesday [June 24, 2008] at an extended
care facility in Philadelphia [Pennsylvania], said his son, Ira
Tucker
Jr. He was 83.
The versatile performer, who sang baritone, tenor and sometimes bass,
also wrote songs, including "Christian's Automobile" and "In the
Morning."
During the early years of his tenure, when the group was struggling
to
distinguish itself from other a cappella outfits, Tucker began to
help
the group forge a unique sound and style.
"He really moved the Dixie Hummingbirds into what we call the 'soul
gospel' era, which would roughly be throughout the 1950s," said Jerry
Zolten, author of "Great God A'mighty: The Dixie Hummingbirds
Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music." "We begin hearing
instrumental accompaniment. We begin hearing that expression of angst
and soulfulness that we associate with the best of Southern soul. We
began to hear a different kind of rhythmic feel."
Onstage, Tucker became the model for what one musicologist termed
"the
activity singer." He dropped to his knees, gestured, pointed, ran up
the aisle of the performance venue. Artists including soul singer
Jackie Wilson, Bobby "Blue" Bland and the Temptations found
inspiration and example in the Hummingbirds.
"During those golden years, he was paired with James Walker," another
Hummingbird, Zolten said. "They were like pistons, firing the melody
back and forth until the audience was in a frenzy. It was something
to
see."
Born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on May 17, 1925, Tucker was
initiated into the world of making music and money at about age 6
after he learned to whistle.
"He'd go door to door and whistle, and because he was so little,
people would give him money," Ira Tucker Jr. said in an interview
with
The Times. "He listened to birds, and got their sounds down."
Soon Tucker advanced to singing. Beneath a street light, he sang, and
people would sit on a hill nearby and listen to him perform. "That's
how he got noticed by the Dixie Hummingbirds," his son said.
In the late 1930s, a teenage Tucker joined the Hummingbirds. By then
the group had been together 10 years and had put in place a set of
rules that kept the members on the straight and narrow: no drinking,
no smoking, no running around with women, no secular music.
Once, when he was still new to the group, Tucker sneaked into an
outhouse to indulge his smoking habit.
"I smoked so much they thought the outhouse was on fire," Tucker said
years later. "Everybody was yelling, 'Tuck, are you in there?' "
For that indulgence he paid a stiff fine of $5.
Over the years, as the popularity of the group grew, the men sang
throughout the country at black churches and gospel extravaganzas and
performed often at Harlem's Apollo Theater. In 1942, they sang at the
Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in New York.
"Ira was really proud of the role the Dixie Hummingbirds played in
overcoming social injustice and prejudice," Zolten said. "He was
proud
of the time spent working in Cafe Society in New York, breaking down
the barriers of segregation in the 1940s."
In 1945 Tucker rented the Metropolitan Opera House in Philadelphia
for
a Hummingbirds concert -- against conventional wisdom that said the
venue was too large for gospel artists.
The Hummingbirds sang at the New****t Folk Festival in 1966 and later
toured Europe. In 1973 they recorded with Paul Simon on "Loves Me
Like
a Rock" and soon after released their own version of the song, which
won them a Grammy Award.
In more recent years Tucker collaborated with Wynonna Judd on "How
Great Thou Art" and recorded a country album. Tucker and the group
were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame; and in 2007 his album
"Still Keeping It Real: The Last Man Standing" was nominated for a
Grammy.
"He had an eclectic mind," his son said. "He did gospel music, but he
took it to a lot of different areas."
In addition to his son, Tucker is survived by his wife, Louise; two
daughters, Sundray Tucker of Philadelphia and Lynda Laurance of
Sherman Oaks [California], both of whom are vocalists; five
grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Ray Arthur
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