Jessica Morgan Tucker
Jessica Morgan Tucker, born October 3, 1985, sang almost
from the time she could talk, taking after several family
members including her grandma, Margie Tucker; uncle, Tim
Tucker, who sings with AWOL in Huntingdon, and granddaddy,
the late Alton Weatherford.
"I knew many songs when I was two or three," she says from
the dining room of her parents' home in Huntingdon. "It's
just something that was in me, a need to sing." She recalls
in particular learning the lyrics to, "I'm Going to Love You
Forever and Ever" at the age of three.
Now a pretty, 19-year-old brunette and a student of voice at
the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Jessica maintains
close ties with home. Her parents are Dr. Tony and Charlotte
Tucker. Tony is a pharmacist at City Drugs in Huntingdon and
Charlotte is superintendent of the Carroll County school
district.
These days she enjoys having a new "brother" at home in her
16-year-old cousin, Tyler Weatherford, who lives with her
parents. "We love having him here," she says.
Also in Huntingdon is Jessica's romantic interest, Adam
Pruitt, a senior at Huntingdon High School.
"We've been sweethearts awhile, he's really supportive of
me," she smiles, showing off a pretty diamond on her left
hand. "He's going into law, I think. I couldn't have anybody
in the music business; I need the rock."
Her brother Shannon and his wife, Sharon, live in Nashville
with Jessica's ten-year-old niece, Leigh Ayn, "the apple of
her daddy's eye."
"I get to stop by and see them on the way to Knoxville and
that's always fun," says Jessica, who, before Leigh Ayn, was
the only girl on both sides of her family "for a long way."
"I got to be pampered," she smiles.
During her childhood, already singing at home "all the
time," Jessica began singing at church and "loved it."
"I remember wearing a little lamb costume, on stage
singing," she smiles, recalling her participation in a
church musical.
Jessica was in the fourth grade when Ms. Jeanie Newman, who
later became her high school choir director, helped her
practice the song "Special Delivery" for the school's talent
contest. It was a song Jessica says she enjoyed hearing
Jeannie sing each year at Christmastime.
The talent contest became a tradition for Jessica: she
entered each year with the exception of the fifth grade,
when construction on the school's auditorium precluded the
contest.
"I won second and first place almost every year but never
won grand prize," she says, noting that, at the time, it was
the singing that was important, not the entertainment. "I
wasn't much of an entertainer at a young age," she recalls
with some amusement. "I was kind of like a stick."
When she was ten years old, however, she began studying
voice under Mrs. Teresa Smith, wife of McKenzie veterinarian
Charles Smith and teacher to many talented singers,
including country singer Jessica Andrews.
"I learned a lot. She gave me a really solid background,"
Jessica says, adding that because her voice was not suited
to country or pop, Smith's specialties, she sang more gospel
and Broadway songs. "She gave me what she could and she was
very good to me."
At 13 years old, Jessica and Brittany Washburn, another
Smith student, attended "StageWorks" in Nashville at the
Tennessee Performing Arts Center. StageWorks is a non-profit
performing arts program offering instruction in acting,
voice, and dance. During a learning session on the voice,
Jessica sang for opera singer and voice instructor Marcia
Jones Thom.
"She said my voice was suited for classical music, not pop
or country. My voice just sounded better when I sang
classical," she explains. "There are people who can't sing
classical and people who can't sing country -- it's a
different quality to the voice -- not that one is better,
they're just different."
Soon, Jessica began traveling to Nashville twice a month to
study under Jones Thom, a relationship that continued until
last summer, when the teacher moved to Virginia as an
instructor of voice at Randolph-Macon Woman's College.
"She introduced me to the beauty of the opera," says
Jessica. "She encouraged me to learn from music camps such
as the North Carolina School of the Arts."
After the North Carolina camp, she attended camps in New
York over the next couple of summers. Then, at about the age
of 16, she expressed interest in becoming an opera singer
herself.
"My father believed I needed to get an expert opinion on my
abilities before I decided to explore a career in classical
music," Jessica relates, explaining, "You have to be able to
sing over an orchestra without any amplification. It's just
basically you and the walls and the last person in the last
row has to hear you. It's what your body does, that's why
there's training for it. Country and pop are not as
physically demanding. No matter how much I tried, if I could
not physically sing the music as it is written to be sung, I
needed to pursue a different career."
In an effort to gauge her options, Jessica traveled to New
York to sing for Shari Anderson, who teaches at the
Manhattan School of Music.
"She offered to teach me and gave me great encouragement to
pursue my dreams," shares Jessica. "Later, I studied with
Ms. Dodie Protraro who felt I had the talent to sing
whatever I wanted. She warned me about the dedication and
hard work it takes to be a classical singer."
A trainer of singers for the Met who teaches at Julliard,
Protraro taught Jessica that no matter how much ability she
had, her success depended as well upon perseverance and an
exactness that Jessica defines as "the beauty and clarity of
each note sung exactly as it is written, with no expression
of holding notes longer or making them higher or lower than
is written."
Jessica has also been helped in the pursuit of her dreams by
Charlie Reicher of the Metropolitan Opera -- "He gave me
encouragement and arranged for lessons with some great
teachers during my summers," she says, "I spent time
learning from these people." -- and Dr. Tom Cleveland of
Vanderbilt. "He helped me learn how voices work and how to
keep me from injuring my vocal chords."
Cleveland is director of vocology at the Vanderbilt Voice
Center and associate professor of otolaryngology in the
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He teaches voice,
conducts research, and is involved in team management and
care of the professional voice.
"He's a big man in the business," says Jessica. "He was
Marcia's teacher and once I got to a certain level she sent
me to him. I'm also interested in vocal therapy, things like
that. It was very interesting getting to work with Dr. Tom
Cleveland."
As her 2004 graduation from Huntingdon High School loomed
nearer, Jessica began working on audition pieces and
applying for colleges with good music programs.
"This was a long and arduous process that truly tested my
will to continue in music," she says.
She sent CDs to the vocal department of each college that
accepted her on an academic basis and received offers to
audition at those that liked her voice quality and
technique. From those, Jessica chose seven to visit: the
Cincinnati Conservatory, Carnegie Mellon University at
Pittsburgh, Julliard School of Music in Manhattan, Manhattan
School of Music, Peabody Conservatory at Johns-Hopkins
University, New England Conservatory at Boston, and the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
"In the end I chose the University of Tennessee at
Knoxville," she says, citing the welcoming atmosphere of the
campus as well as financial incentives, being offered both
an academic scholarship and a music scholarship after
winning the Grace Moore competition. "I love Knoxville and
plan to finish my undergraduate level training there. I just
felt more comfortable at Knoxville."
The Grace Moore Scholarship competition honors the career of
the legendary Tennessee opera star and Academy Award nominee
Grace Moore, who was also the soprano voice in several Walt
Disney movies including Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
"I've always been a Vols fan so that didn't hurt either,"
jokes Jessica.
Nearing the end of her freshman year at UTK, Jessica has a
3.92 grade point average. "The only thing I made a B in was
my Italian," she says. "It's a big balancing act: Being in
the school of music, at bare minimum I practice seven hours
a week because it takes that much to keep up. Studying has
to be next, then a social life if you have one. And you have
to breathe sometimes, and that's about all the time I have."
Jessica recently joined the Sigma Kappa sorority on campus.
The organization's main philanthropy is gerontology (the
study of aging) and it is a leading contributor to
Alzheimer's research and education.
She also enjoys spending time with her roommate, Brittany
Petersen, from Washington D.C.
"We were randomly matched but I love her to death," she
says.
This summer, Jessica plans to spend a month in Italy in
order to learn the language, finishing her second year of
Italian through a University of Tennessee course offered at
Urbino, Italy.
The language is necessary in becoming an opera singer,
Jessica notes. "You have to know Italian fluently and have a
working knowledge of German and French. That's one hard
thing about my major: you have to have three foreign
languages and several years of English and diction and UTK
has a very hard foreign language program, but I'll tough it
out."
Her plan is to complete her master's degree and then "play
it by ear."
"I'd like to sing at the Met at some time in the future, and
I'd like to tour Europe with an Opera company," she says.
"But as far as all that goes I'll have to play it by ear."
Already, Jessica has accomplished much in her field with her
recent second place victory at the NATS (National
Association of Teachers of Singing) competition in
Louisville, Kentucky.
She was selected by her UTK voice instructor, Ms. Marjorie
Bennett Stephens, as a representative in the contest amid
some 100 contestants in the freshmen division.
"There were three rounds and in the last round there were
three people," Jessica says. "I was just really happy to
make it to the second round and when I got to the third
round I was ecstatic. I worked very hard and coming in
second is wonderful.
"After you work so hard physically and get on stage... it's
that that you work for. You put in all that work and all
those hours so you can get up on stage and love it, so
somebody else can enjoy it. It would take too much if you
didn't enjoy it yourself."
