Tammy Wynette
| Tammy Wynette | |
|---|---|
| A tribute album to Tammy Wynette A tribute album to Tammy Wynette
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Virginia Wynette Pugh |
| Also known as | Tammy Wynette, "The First Lady of Country Music" |
| Born | May 5, 1942 |
| Origin | Tremont, Mississippi |
| Died | April 6, 1998 |
| Genre(s) | country music |
| Occupation(s) | country singer |
| Instrument(s) | singing/guitar |
| Years active | 1966-1998 |
| Label(s) | Epic |
| Associated acts | Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, George Jones, David Houston, Lynn Anderson |
| Website | Tammy Wynette Official Site |
Tammy Wynette (May 5, 1942 – April 6, 1998) was a country singer and songwriter. She was known as the "First Lady of Country Music" and one of her best-known songs was "Stand by Your Man," which was one of the biggest selling hit singles by a woman in the history of the music genre.
Early life
Tammy Wynette was born Virginia Wynette Pugh near Tremont, Mississippi, the only child of William Hollis Pugh (died February 13, 1943) and Mildred Faye Russell (1922–1991). She was always called Wynette (pronounced Win-net), or Nettie, instead of Virginia. Her father was a farmer and local musician. He died of a brain tumor when Wynette was nine months of age. Her mother worked in an office, as a substitute school teacher, as well as on the family farm. After the death of Hollis Pugh, she left Wynette in the care of her parents, Thomas Chester and Flora A. Russell, and moved to Memphis to work in a World War II defense plant. In 1946, she married Foy Lee, a farmer from Mississippi. Wynette was raised on the Itawamba County farm of her maternal grandparents where she was born. The place was partly on the border with Alabama. She has often claimed that the state line ran right through their property. she jokingly said "my top half came from Alabama and my bottom half came from Mississippi" As a youngster, she worked in the fields picking cotton alongside the hired crews to get in the crop. She grew up with her aunt, Carolyn Russell, who was only five years older than she was. Wynette sang gospel tunes with her grandmother, learned to play the piano and the guitar. As a child and teenager, country music provided an escape from her hard life. Wynette grew up idolizing Hank Williams, Skeeter Davis, Patsy Cline, and George Jones and would play their records over and over on the inexpensive children's record player she owned, dreaming of one day being a star herself.
She attended Tremont High School, where she was an all-star basketball player. A month before graduation, she married her first husband. He was a construction worker and they moved several times. Her early jobs included working as a waitress, a receptionist, a barmaid, and in a shoe factory. In 1963, she attended beauty school in Tupelo, Mississippi, and became a hairdresser; she would renew her cosmetology license every year for the rest of her life, just in case she should have to go back to a daily job. Her first husband, whom she left before the birth of their third daughter, was not supportive of her ambition to become a country singer, and, is said by Wynette to have told her, "Dream on, Baby." Her baby developed spinal meningitis and Wynette tried to make extra money by performing at night. In 1965, Wynette sang on the Country Boy Eddie Show on WBRC-TV in Birmingham, Alabama, which led to some appearances with Porter Wagoner. In 1966, she moved with her three girls from Birmingham to Nashville, Tennessee, where she pounded the pavement to get a recording contract. After being turned down repeadedly by every other record company she'd met with, she auditioned for producer Billy Sherrill, who signed her to Epic Records.
Rise to fame
Once signed to Epic, Sherrill suggested she consider changing her name to something that might make more of impression with the public. According to her 1979 memoir, Stand by Your Man, during their meeting, Wynette was wearing her long, blonde hair in a ponytail, and Sherill noted that she put him in mind of Debbie Reynolds in the film "Tammy and the Bachelor," and suggested "Tammy" as a possible name; thus she became Tammy Wynette. Her first single, "Apartment #9" (written by Johnny Paycheck), was released in late 1966, and reached the top forty on the U.S. country charts. In 1967 she had hits with "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad," "My Elusive Dreams" (a duet with David Houston), and "I Don't Wanna Play House," all of which reached the country top ten. Wynette had three number one hits in 1968: "Take Me to Your World," "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," and her best known song, "Stand by Your Man" (which she said she wrote in fifteen minutes). In 1969, she had two additional number one hits: "Singing My Song" and "The Ways to Love a Man." That same year, Wynette earned a Gold record (awarded for albums selling in excess of one million copies) for "Tammy Wynette's Greatest Hits." She was the first female country artist to do so.
Director Bob Rafelson used a number of her songs in the soundtrack of his 1970 film Five Easy Pieces. Her chart success continued into the 1970s with such hits as "Good Lovin' (Makes it Right)" (1971), "He Loves Me All the Way" (1971), "Bedtime Story" (1972), "Kids Say the Darndest Things" (1973), "Woman to Woman" (1974), "You and Me" (1976), "'Til I can Make it on My Own" (1976), and "Womanhood" (1978).
She married her second husband shortly after her first divorce became final. While still married to him, however, she began a relationship with George Jones, a legendary country performer who was known to have a problem with alcoholism. (They first became involved somewhere around 1968.) Eventually Wynette parted with her second husband and married Jones in Ringgold, Georgia, with whom she had a daughter, Georgette (born in 1970.) It was a difficult marriage, however, due largely to Jones' drinking, and they were divorced in 1975; During their years together, they recorded a number of duet albums, starting in 1971, the first being the Top-10 hit "Take Me" (...to your darkest room, close every window and bolt every door). They would continue to record together, even after their divorce, through the mid 1990s.
Home life and problems
Aside from her music, Wynette's private life was as tumultuous as many of her songs. Over the course of her life, she had had five husbands: Euple Byrd (married 1959–divorced 1966); Don Chapel (married 1967–annulled 1968); George Jones (married 1969–divorced 1975); Michael Tomlin (married 1976–annulled 1976); and George Richey (married 1978–her death 1998). She and Byrd had three children, Gwendolyn Lee ("Gwen") Byrd (born 1961), Jacquelyn Faye ("Jackie") Byrd (born 1962) and Tina Denise Byrd (born 1965), and she and Jones had one child, Tamala Georgette Jones (born 1970). Tammy had a publicized relationship with actor Burt Reynolds in the 1970s. Her fourth marriage, to Michael Tomlin, lasted only six weeks. She then married George Richey, who became her manager and lasting love of her life. In 1978, she was mysteriously abducted by a masked man at a Nashville shopping center, driven 80 miles south in her luxury car, beaten and released. No one was ever arrested or identified. Initially, that was the story told to the press by Tammy. Years later, Tammy's jobless daughter, Jackie Daly, alleges that Tammy told her that the kidnapping was a fabricated insight to disguise the fact that George Richey was beating her. She also had a number of serious physical ailments beginning in the 1970s, including operations on her gall bladder, kidney and on the nodules on her throat.
A country music queen
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wynette dominated the country charts. She had seventeen number one hits. Along with Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Lynn Anderson, she helped redefine the role and place of female country singers. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, her chart success began to wane. While her singles and albums continued to reach the country top forty, they occurred with less frequency than the previous decade. Meanwhile, her medical problems continued, including inflammations of her bile duct. In 1986, she acted on the CBS TV soap opera Capitol. In 1988, she filed for bankruptcy as a result of a bad investment in two Florida shopping centers. Her 1987 album "Higher Ground" broke through with a new contemporary sound, broadening her audience. She recorded a song with the British electronica group The KLF in late 1991 titled "Justified and Ancient (Stand by the JAMs)," which became a number one hit in eighteen countries the following year. In the video, scrolling electronic titles said that "Miss Tammy Wynette is the first lady of country music." Wynette appeared in the video seated on a throne. Although some saw the inclusion of Wynette as a novel ploy for attention[citation needed] to the song - The KLF were well known for scams and stunts - her inclusion was a mark of respect from The KLF and not an after-thought or marketing ploy.[citation needed] Wynette's vocal performance was exceptional and the song was probably one of the better dance songs of the early 1990s in terms of melodic construction and performance.[citation needed] In 1992, future First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said during a 60 Minutes interview that she wasn't "some little woman, standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette." The remark set off a firestorm of controversy and Wynette demanded, and received, an apology from Clinton. (Hillary Clinton's remark aside, Wynette was nonetheless a Clinton supporter, and later performed at a Clinton fundraiser.)
Comeback
The 1993 album Honky Tonk Angels gave her a chance to record with Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn for the first time; though yielding no hit singles, the album did well on the country charts. The following year, she released Without Walls, a collection of duets with a number of country, pop and rock and roll performers, including Wynonna Judd, Elton John, Lyle Lovett, Aaron Neville, Smokey Robinson, Sting and a number of others.
Wynette also designed and sold her own line of jewelry in the 1990s. In 1994, she suffered an abdominal infection that almost killed her. She was in a coma for six days. In 1995, she and George Jones recorded their first new duet album in thirteen years. They last performed together in 1997 at Concerts in the Country Lanierland, Georgia Wynette lent her vocals on the UK #1 hit Perfect Day in 1997, which was written by Lou Reed.
Death
After years of medical problems, numerous hospitalizations, approximately twenty-six major surgeries and an addiction to large doses of pain medication, Tammy Wynette died at the age of fifty-five while sleeping on the couch in her living room in Nashville, Tennessee. The coroner later declared that she died of a cardiac arrythmia. She is interred in Woodlawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Nashville.
Trivia
- In 2002, she was ranked #2 on CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music behind one of her childhood idols, Patsy Cline.
- In 2003 a survey of country music writers, producers and stars listed "Stand By Your Man" as the top country song of all time. Country Music Television broadcast a special for the top 100 songs, with the #1 song performed by Martina McBride.
- Judson Baptist Church, who neighbors Wynette's house, purchased the house, which belonged to Hank Williams before he died, and the land for a little over a million dollars. The Wynette house is used as a Youth Center as well as a guest house.
- Stand By Your Man is sung in The Blues Brothers 1980 motion picture, by both Jake and Elwood Blues, at Bob's Country Bunker. The two brothers did not know much about country music but at least they knew this song - showing how popular it was (and still is).
Discography
Hit singles
| Year | Single | Album | U.S. Country | U.S. Hot 100 |
| 1967 | "Apartment No. 9" | Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad | 44 | - |
| 1967 | "I Don't Wanna Play House" | Take Me To Your World/I Don't Wanna Play House | #1 | - |
| 1967 | "My Elusive Dreams" | My Elusive Dreams | #1 | 89 |
| 1967 | "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" | Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad | 3 | - |
| 1968 | "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" | D-I-V-O-R-C-E | #1 | 89 |
| 1968 | "Take Me To Your World" | Take Me To Your World/I Don't Wanna Play House | #1 | - |
| 1969 | "Stand by Your Man" | Stand by Your Man | #1 | 19 |
| 1969 | "The Ways to Love a Man" | The Ways to Love a Man | #1 | 89 |
| 1970 | "He Loves Me All the Way" | Tammy's Touch | #1 | 97 |
| 1970 | "I'll See Him Through" | Tammy's Touch | 2 | 100 |
| 1970 | "Run, Woman Run" | The First Lady | #1 | 92 |
| 1971 | "Good Lovin' (Makes It Right)" | My Man | #1 | - |
| 1971 | "We Can Sure Love Each Other" | We Can Sure Love Each Other | 2 | - |
| 1971 | "The Wonders You Perform" | Tammy's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 | 5 | - |
| 1972 | "Bedtime Story" | Bedtime Story | #1 | 86 |
| 1972 | "My Man" | My Man | #1 | - |
| 1972 | "Reach Out Your Hand" | Bedtime Story | 2 | - |
| 1972 | "Take Me" | We Go Together | 9 | - |
| 1973 | "Til' I Get It Right" | My Man | #1 | - |
| 1973 | "Kids Say the Darndest Things" | Kids Say the Darndest Things | #1 | 72 |
| 1973 | "We're Gonna Hold On" (with George Jones) | We're Gonna Hold On | #1 | - |
| 1974 | "We're Not the Jet Set" (with George Jones) | We're Gonna Hold On | 15 | - |
| 1974 | "Another Lonely Song" | Another Lonely Song | #1 | - |
| 1974 | "Woman to Woman" | Woman to Woman | 4 | - |
| 1975 | "I Still Believe In Fairytales" | I Still Believe In Fairytales | 13 | - |
| 1975 | "You Make Me Want to Be You Mother" | I Still Believe In Fairyatles | 4 | - |
| 1976 | "Til' I Can Make It On My Own" | Til' I Can Make It On My Own | #1 | 84 |
| 1976 | "Golden Ring" | Golden Ring | #1 | - |
| 1976 | "You and Me" | You and Me | #1 | - |
| 1977 | "Let's Get Together (One Last Time)" | Let's Get Together | 6 | - |
| 1977 | "Near You" | Golden Ring | #1 | - |
| 1977 | "One of a Kind" | One of a Kind | 6 | - |
| 1977 | "Southern California" | Golden Ring | 5 | - |
| 1978 | "Womanhood" | Womanhood | 3 | - |
| 1979 | "They Call It Making Love" | Just Tammy | 6 | - |
| 1980 | "He Was There (When I Needed You)" | Only Lonely Sometimes | 17 | - |
| 1980 | "Two Story House" | Together Again | 2 | - |
| 1980 | "A Pair of Old Sneakers" | Together Again | 19 | - |
| 1982 | "Another Chance" | Soft Touch | 8 | - |
| 1983 | "A Good Night's Love" | Good Love & Heartbreak | 19 | - |
| 1987 | "Talkin' to Myself Again" | Higher Ground | 16 | - |
| 1987 | "Your Love" | Higher Ground | 12 | - |
| 1998 | "Stand by Your Man" | - | 56 | - |
Albums
| Year | Album | U.S. Country | |
| 1967 | My Elusive Dreams | #11 | |
| 1967 | Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad | #7 | |
| 1968 | D-I-V-O-R-C-E | #1 | |
| 1969 | Inspiration | #19 | |
| 1969 | Stand by Your Man | #2 | |
| 1969 | Tammy's Greatest Hits | #2 | |
| 1970 | Christmas With Tammy | - | |
| 1970 | Tammy's Touch | #1 | |
| 1970 | The First Lady | #2 | |
| 1970 | The Ways to Love a Man | #3 | |
| 1970 | The World of Tammy Wynette | #8 | |
| 1971 | Tammy's Greatest Hits: Volume 2 | #5 | |
| 1971 | We Go Together | #3 | |
| 1971 | We Can Sure Love Each Other | #8 | |
| 1972 | Bedtime Story | #7 | |
| 1972 | Me and the First Lady | #6 | |
| 1973 | Kids Say the Darndest Things | #3 | |
| 1973 | Let's Build a World Together | #12 | |
| 1973 | My Man | #2 | |
| 1973 | The First Songs of the First Lady | #17 | |
| 1974 | Another Lonely Song | #8 | |
| 1974 | We're Gonna Hold On | #3 | |
| 1974 | Woman to Woman | #21 | |
| 1975 | George & Tammy & Tina | #37 | |
| 1975 | I Still Believe in Fairytales | #24 | |
| 1975 | Tammy Wynette's Greatest Hits: Volume 3 | #28 | |
| 1976 | Til' I Can Make It On My Own | #3 | |
| 1976 | Golden Ring | #1 | |
| 1976 | You and Me | #4 | |
| 1977 | Greatest Hits | #23 | |
| 1977 | Let's Go Together | #19 | |
| 1977 | One of a Kind | #32 | |
| 1978 | Greatest Hits: Volume 4 | #37 | |
| 1978 | Womanhood | #14 | |
| 1979 | Just Tammy | #25 | |
| 1980 | Only Lonely Sometimes | #37 | |
| 1980 | Starting Over | #17 | |
| 1981 | Together Again | #26 | |
| 1981 | Cowboys Don't Shoot Straight Like They Used To | #21 | |
| 1981 | Crying In the Rain | #18 | |
| 1981 | Encore | #44 | |
| 1983 | Biggest Hits | #64 | |
| 1983 | Even the Strong Get Lonely | #66 | |
| 1983 | Good Love and Heartbreak | #62 | |
| 1985 | Sometimes When We Touch | #32 | |
| 1987 | Higher Ground | #43 | |
| 1989 | Next to You | #42 | |
| 1990 | Heart Over Mind | #64 | |
| 1993 | Honky Tonk Angels | #6 | |
| 1995 | One | #12 |
Awards
Grammy Awards
- 1967: Best Female Country Vocal Performance
- 1969: Best Female Country Vocal Performance
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Wynette, Tammy, 1979. Stand by Your Man. Simon & Schuster, New York. ISBN 0-671-22884-6
- Daly, Jackie, 2000. A Daughter Recalls Her Mother's Tragic Life and Death. G.P. Putnam's Sons New York. ISBN 0-425-17925-7
See also
- Academy of Country Music
- Country Music Association
- Country Music Hall of Fame
- List of country music performers
- List of best-selling music artists
External links
- Official Site
- Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum — Tammy Wynette
- Tammy's Official Discography With Original Picture Sleeve
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