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In 1907, Tucker got her first break in vaudeville, singing at Chris Brown’s amateur night. After her initial audition, she overheard Brown muttering to a colleague, “This one’s so big and ugly, the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up.” Despite her protestations, producers insisted that she could be successful only in blackface. Quickly booked into Joe Woods’s New England circuit, she became known as a “world renowned coon singer,” a role that she couldn’t bear to let her family know she had taken. A stroke of luck befell her when her costume trunks were lost while touring; she debuted onstage in Boston without blackface, declaring to the shocked audience: “You-all can see I’m a white girl. Well, I’ll tell you something more: I’m not Southern. I’m a Jewish girl and I just learned this Southern accent doing a blackface act for two years. And now, Mr. Leader, please play my song.”

It wasn’t long before Tucker was performing out of blackface to increasingly adulating audiences. Songs like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “I’m Living Alone and I Like It,” “I Ain’t Takin’ Orders from No One,” and “No Man is Ever Gonna Worry Me” were hits with female and male audiences alike, at venues such as Tony Pastor’s Palace, Reisenweber’s supper club, vaudeville houses throughout the United States, and music halls throughout Europe. In 1910, African-American composer Shelton Brooks wrote her immensely popular signature song “Some of These Days.” This, like many other songs, Tucker purchased exclusive rights to sing.

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Tucker was known for her reverence of the Hebrew principle of Modestyzedakah, charity, and acts of good will toward others. In 1945, she established the Sophie Tucker Foundation, donating time, energy, and resources to an ecumenical assortment of causes. Tucker contributed to the Jewish Theatrical Guild, of which she was a life member, the Negro Actors Guild, and the Catholic Actors Guild, as well as the Will Rogers Memorial Hospital, the Motion Picture Relief Fund, synagogues, and hospitals. She supported Israel Bonds, and her foundation endowed a Sophie Tucker chair at Brandeis University in 1955. In 1959, on the first of several trips to Israel, Tucker dedicated the Sophie Tucker Youth Center at Bet Shemesh in the Judean Hills. Two years later, she sponsored another youth center at Kibbutz Be’eri in the northern Negev near Gaza. In 1962, she sponsored the Sophie Tucker Forest near the Bet Shemesh amphitheater and raised money for another forest. She also donated time and money to numerous hospitals and homes for the aged.

Tucker used her economic independence to empower herself and others, which created tensions in her personal life. Early in her career, Tucker had helped many of the prostitutes who lived in the same rooming houses as she, stashing money from their pimps, noting that, “Every one of them supported a family back home, or a child somewhere.” While on tour, she brought her band to play in houses of prostitution for women who’d taken the night off in her honor. Tucker felt that it was her economic independence that doomed her marriages to Tuck, accompanist Frank Westphal, and manager Al Lackey, all of which ended in divorce. As she explained it: “Once you start carrying your own suitcase, paying your own bills, running your own show, you’ve done something to yourself that makes you one of those women men like to call ‘a pal’ and ‘a good sport,’ the kind of woman they tell their troubles to. But you’ve cut yourself off from the orchids and the diamond bracelets, except those you buy yourself.”

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