My father was a fan, but while I grew up with Wells’ music and we lived nearby to her house in Madison, Tennessee, I didn’t see her perform until I was in college and she was in her late 60s. Perhaps her upstanding life and comportment was what allowed country audiences to accept her delivery of lyrics about infidelity and anguish that perhaps seem old-hat today but were a revelation then in country music, especially coming from a female singer. The tales in the songs were in marked contrast to her domestic life, which was upright and conventional-she remained married to Johnnie Wright for more than 70 years, until his passing last autumn. She had an inherent empathy for the characters she drew in song, she could convey the anguish of the single girl who couldn’t claim to be an angel, or the bereft resolve of the young soldier’s widow walking the cemetery to “come to the place where is sleeping” knowing the shudder of grief that awaits her. She transformed those old cheating and heart songs into soul music by resisting the overplay of emotion her drama remains all pent up in that voice, painfully curtailed, both sentimental and stoic like the country folks who were her rural audience. What first drew me to Kitty was her voice in her early records, high and plaintive, something ancient and visceral that cut through the hard surface of 1950s honky tonk. Kitty Wells was the first and only Queen of Country Music,” said Dolly Parton, “no matter what they call the rest of us.” “If I had never heard of Kitty Wells, I don’t think I would have been a singer myself.” “She was my hero,” Loretta Lynn said this week. Direct and frank songs like “Poison In Your Heart,” “Release Me,” “Making Believe,” “Mommy For A Day,” “This White Circle” chart a modern woman’s struggles to find love and domestic bliss in the challenging setting of the post-World War II South. Wells and her collaborators, husband Johnnie Wright and producer Owen Bradley, managed to follow up that initial success with a string of hits that went unbroken for more than a decade. Kitty’s reply managed to convey a feminine weariness about being underestimated and a thinly veiled anger at being blamed for domestic strife. Written by a man, JD Miller, it was intended as an answer to the hit “Wild Side of Life” by Hank Thompson. The song’s emergence as a proto-feminist statement was largely accidental. On the verge of retirement, she’d only agreed to record “Honky Tonk Angels” for the $125 session fee. She was 33, had three children and little success with her own records though she was a popular element of the group show. ![]() When she cut the song, Wells was a featured singer in her husband’s group, Johnnie & Jack and the Tennessee Mountain Boys. ![]() While commonplace today, this was nothing short of a revolution in the 1950s, when “girl singers” were meant to be seen, and heard just a little. Her commercial success proved that female country music artists could sell records, make albums, headline concerts and match every success of their male counterparts. Sixty years ago, her 1952 rendition of the song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” became the first chart-topping hit by a woman in country-music history. Kitty Wells started her career as a “girl singer” in the 1940s and ended it as the “Queen of Country Music,” a mantle she assumed in the early 1950s and wore until her passing Monday at the age of 92.
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