Country music legend Tammy Wynette came from humble beginnings, and some friends said she never lost that humility before her death in 1998. She worked her way to the top of the genre she loved with her signature, heartachy singing style. And she once explained why she preferred making those slow, sad country songs more than any other.
Tammy Wynette was a single mom and a beautician before she became a country music icon
After Wynette’s father died and her mother left, her grandparents raised her in Mississippi, and she spent her early life in cotton fields. Later in life, she kept a bowl full of cotton in her mansion as a reminder of her hard-working roots (Country Living).
Wynette married in 1960 and soon had three daughters. She raised her kids as a single mom after leaving her husband, and her youngest of those first three developed spinal meningitis.
After moving to Alabama, she worked as a beautician, but she also got up early to sing on a television show, putting in more than full-time to help pay hospital bills. Such details of her early life made her all the more relatable to country music fans.
After moving to Nashville in 1966, Wynette’s singing career kicked off. By 1969, she’d released a string of hits and married legend George Jones, with whom she had one more daughter.
Despite her success, she always paid a yearly fee to renew her beautician’s license, just in case she had to return to her career as a hairdresser. And some friends said she never fully realized just who she was.
Tammy Wynette liked the honesty of country music’s storytelling
According to Wynette, country music was a more genuine genre than others, at least when she made it. She felt her fans could relate to her heartbreak songs because they were real, and she sang them from the heart.
“It’s honest music,” she said (Jimmy McDonough’s Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen via NPR). “It tells a story. It has a beginning, middle, and an end … it’s what people live.”
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She compared country songs to rock and roll, adding, “It’s what a lot of rock artists don’t write about. They sugarcoat things.”
Tammy Wynette was country music’s ‘tragic’ queen
Wynette earned her place as one of country music’s most famous tragic queens thanks to her personal life as much as her songs. She was married five times, and her daughters claimed her last marriage was allegedly violently abusive.
“… Tammy was trapped,” biographer Jimmy McDonough wrote of Wynette in Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen (NPR). “Trapped in an addiction she couldn’t conquer, trapped by illness that brought on endless pain, and, many insist, trapped in a marriage to manager/husband George Richey that made everything worse.”
After Wynette died in 1998, her daughter’s filed a wrongful death lawsuit claiming their mother’s doctor had contributed to her addiction to painkillers and her death at 55. They initially included Richey as a co-defendant, but they ultimately dropped his name and settled privately with Wynette’s doctor.
“Life did her in in the end,” McDonough said of Wynette (NPR). “She couldn’t make it on her own.”
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
How to get help: In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
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