Tanya Tucker Wins Her First Grammys at 61

"No matter how old you are, never stop following your dreams,” said singer Tanya Tucker, 61, after winning her first Grammy on Sunday. This milestone came 47 years after her first nomination at age 13 for her signature hit “Delta Dawn.”

Tucker won for best country song ("Bring My Flowers Now") and best country album (While I'm Livin') at the 2020 Grammy Awards ceremony. She told the crowd: “After 50 years in this business, I have a few firsts left.”

Her new hit, with its lyric, “We all think we've got the time until we don't,” is a rousing call to celebrate our loved ones while they're still alive.

Her new album is her first recording of fresh material in 19 years. Tucker lost one of the four Grammy categories for which she was nominated, best country solo performance, to Willie Nelson, 86, for “Ride Me Back Home.”

Like Nelson, Tucker is not an oldies act — or a “faded rose from days gone by,” from the chorus in “Delta Dawn” — but a still vital, intergenerational force in music. She shared Grammy glory with her cowriter and coproducer Brandi Carlile, 38, who got her own start in her mom's bar-band shows at age 7.

Tucker will be on the road beginning Feb. 5, headlining the Country Music Television (CMT) “Next Women of Country” tour.

Applauding Tucker at the Sunday ceremony was her new boyfriend, Craig Dillingham, 61, whom she met at a Texas radio station when they were both 13-year-old prodigies. Her once-tumultuous love life involved affairs with Merle Haggard, Andy Gibb, Don Johnson and Glen Campbell, to whom she was once engaged.

"I would do my whole life all over again,” Tucker has told People magazine. “Hopefully, I would be a little smarter, but I've had a good life, a great life. I wouldn't trade it for anybody's."

Watch Tucker as a teenager perform "Delta Dawn":