Where did the baby name Lacosta come from in 1974?

La Costa's album "With All My Love" (1975).
La Costa album

The interesting name Lacosta first appeared in the U.S. baby name data in 1974, and it reached peak usage several years later in 1977:

1978: 17 baby girls named Lacosta
1977: 40 baby girls named Lacosta [peak]
1976: 33 baby girls named Lacosta
1975: 27 baby girls named Lacosta
1974: 6 baby girls named Lacosta [debut]
1973: unlisted

Where did it come from?

Country singer LaCosta Tucker — older sister of Tanya Tucker. LaCosta recorded under the name “La Costa” from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.

LaCosta’s parents, “oilfield nomads” Beau and Juanita, moved the family around the South while the children were growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

Their first kid they very conventionally called Don, but after that they named them exotically, to relieve the drab hardness of their existence. They called their first girl LaCosta. “In Spanish, it means ‘the coast’,” she says.

“When we were living In Seminole, Texas, where I was born, our parents had a real good friend who lived In Denver City, about 15 miles away. Her name was LaCosta Ivey, and they named me after her because they liked her and they were looking for a name that was different.”

In 1999 — more than two decades after “Lacosta” debuted in the data — Tanya herself used it as a middle name for her third child, daughter Layla LaCosta Laseter.

What are your thoughts on the baby name Lacosta?

Source: “LaCosta, Tanya Tucker’s Big Sister, Gets A Break, Too.” Cincinnati Enquirer 25 Jun. 1974: 34.

P.S. Natalie Cole included a song called “La Costa” on her 1977 album Thankful. But the song wasn’t a single, and the album was released late in the year (November), so I doubt the song had much influence on baby names.

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