STILLWATER, Okla. — A message is the reasoning behind one man’s music career.

Jon Tucker, a Haskell native, started to write his first song in his teens.

“I grew up in church and I don’t know really how to explain it,” said Tucker. “I went to Falls Creek one summer. I was 16. I came home and was laying on my bed, and I just started singing this song in my head and I thought, ‘Man, I need to write that down,’ and I wrote two songs back to back and for the first time. I had somebody that played piano for me and (I) sang that song and that’s just where it kind of started from there.”

After graduating from high school, he said, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He had been involved in a Bible study, and friends convinced him that he should go to a Bible school.

“So I went for a year to Victory Bible Institute,” said Tucker. “I kept writing and not long after I got out of that, I was actually in my brother’s church and started leading worship there and then went to another church and it (was) just a culmination of things.”

He continued to write songs and recorded his first album in 1989.

“It was just kind of a personal thing that I wanted to accomplish,” he said. “I did eight original songs. Recorded a few country songs after that I had written, went on a Nashville review show and then just hit a void for a long time in ’98.”

After time in Nashville, Tucker returned home to Oklahoma. He said he realized everyone was chasing that dream of a music career. So he took what he had learned and brought it back with him.

“(I) got back into full-time leading worship at a church for about a year and integrated a lot of stuff I wrote into it,” said Tucker. “So that’s where I really got a hold of some things I hadn’t done before.”

An occurrence in Tucker’s life helped inspire him to continue writing.

“About five years ago, just started having a turning point in my life,” he said. “A lot of things were happening, a lot of trials in my life. And I stepped back into that church that I had led worship and 10 years later, I’m walking across the sanctuary and I hear this song and I thought, ‘Man, that song sounds familiar,’ and I turned around and realized that they were singing my song. And I thought if something can last 10 years in a body of believers and people, then there’s something greater to it than I can understand.”

His latest album is titled “Ride on Cowboy.” Tucker performs tour dates, does CD signings and sings at funerals when asked. However, he said, the goal of the music is to minister the love of God to people.

“Well, for me, it still comes down to the message, and this is an avenue to minister that message to people,” said Tucker. “It’s not really about performing. It’s just about meeting people and giving them some kind of hope, something solid that they can hold onto, and hopefully, there’s enough in a song that they can have hope, because we live in a hopeless world. It’s a world, as you see, that is falling apart every day. But for me, with this, I have complete and total peace in the midst of the storm because I know who’s in the boat with me.”

He enjoys professing that message.

“Hopefully, we’ll continue to do it for a long time,” he said.

For more information or to contact Jon Tucker, go to www.tatemusicgroup.com.