Lucky Tubb
What would you do if your house burned down, you spent time in the hoosegow, and your first name was Lucky?
If your last name was Tubb, you’d sing about it.
That’s what Lucky Tubb does. And yes, he is kin to country music legend Ernest Tubb. The young Tubb’s bio already reads like liner notes of a future legend.
Born in Fort Worth, Tubb was raised from the age of three by his great grandparents C.R. and Margie Tubb. C.R. was also a musician, and Lucky claims his favorite memories include riding in his grandfather’s Cadillac listening to him spin tales about the country music legends they listened to on the car radio.
Tubb started his own music career at age 14. As he moved to Austin and began building a following, he is trying to live up to his great grandfather’s dying wish that young Lucky carry on the family name and “make him proud.”
With a country music pedigree like that, do you run from comparisons with the great Ernest Tubb, or embrace them?
Lucky Tubb seems to lean more to the latter.
“I’m Lucky Tubb, and my great uncle is Ernest Tubb,” the slender crooner told me as he stuck out his hand after a gig.
The look, music, and sound evoke that early 1950s milieu. You would not be surprised to see Hank himself step out of his Cadillac and join the band on stage.
But the music has the edge Lucky picked up from playing in the Austin area, hanging with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Wayne Hancock, and Guy Forsyth.
Mesquite thin, wearing those wonderful western shirts with snaps up to the elbows, backed by that high lonesome steel guitar, it seems perfectly natural for Tubb to wail his Lonesome Cowboy Blues. Ernest would never have had a screaming lead guitar or blues harp in his arrangements… but the words would just as naturally spill from his mouth:
Playing all these little towns
Getting all these thrills
Seems I never have enough
To keep up on my bills
Lord have mercy, I was born to lose
I got myself a little bit of them lonesome cowboy blues.
You will find that and nine other honky-tonk tunes on Tubb’s CD “Generations” – songs with names like Walk Away, Mean Momma Blues, and Lonesome Yodel No. 2.
If you are hankerin’ for a bit of those blues yourself, just listen to Lucky this weekend.
