The Lasting, Loving Legacy Of Country Music’s Trailblazing Women.
By Lori Acken, ReMIND Magazine
In the late ’50s and early ’60s, country music’s male stars — Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Webb Pierce and a legion of others — burned up the charts with fiery, and sometimes forlorn, songs about the ladies they were pinin’ for, lovin’ or leavin’.
And the ladies?
From the mountains of Tennessee to the hills of Virginia and beyond, a few extraordinary women eyed their own lives, the evolving state of womanhood and the cash that Cash and his contemporaries were making and thought they might have a song or two inside them, too.
Led by Maybelle Carter, a sleepy-eyed Virginia girl who, along with her kin, made the plainspoken music of rural America a commercial success in the ’30s, a cadre of female artists began to form — women who would write and sing about what they knew, what they observed, what they longed for and what they couldn’t abide, forming a tightknit and supportive circle in the process. Their collective accolades could fill these pages. But their truest legacy is the foundation they built for and with each other and the women of country music whose paths they paved: Write and sing your truth, never apologize, own your career and always, always have each other’s backs.
While Mother Maybelle and her daughters (including Johnny Cash’s firebrand future wife June) were warming the Grand Ole Opry stage, country music’s first female solo hitmaker wondered if she’d have a career at all. Nashville native Kitty Wells was considering retirement from music when a Decca Records executive asked her to record the pointed, plaintive “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
Though country radio DJs and the career-making Opry clutched their collective pearls at the song’s lyrics — which took aim at songs that blamed women for the country’s moral loosening — it reached No. 1 on the country charts, offering irrefutable proof that audiences didn’t mind a lady telling it like it is if the song rang true. And that a female artist could earn bundles of money for her label.
The door had been opened to a brand-new sort of country music star.
The Inspiration Of Loretta Lynn
At the same time Wells’ star was on the rise, Loretta Lynn — famously the Coal Miner’s Daughter from Butcher Hollow, Ky. — launched her own path to country music stardom, not in Nashville, but in Washington state, where her husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn found work. He eventually gifted Loretta with a guitar to ease her restlessness at home with a growing passel of kids.
Songs poured out of the clear-eyed Loretta, who found it second nature to put into music what she observed in her daily life — philandering fellows, unscrupulous ladies and the expectation of women to keep their mouths shut and home fires burning, no matter the circumstance. “I just wrote about things that happened,” she explained. “I was writing about things that nobody talked about in public — and I didn’t realize that they didn’t.”
It was those songs especially — like “The Pill,” “One’s on the Way” and “Rated ‘X,'” all touching on the emerging women’s liberation movement — that garnered Loretta a fierce, and largely female, fan base. And she credited it all to one woman. “If I had never heard of Kitty Wells, I don’t think I would have been a singer myself,” Lynn wrote of her hero when Wells passed away. “As far as I am concerned, no one will ever be as great as Kitty Wells.”
Patsy Cline And Her Sultry Alto
As Lynn began her rise in country music, another plainspoken star was paying close attention to the spirited newcomer.
Cheating the Grim Reaper twice turned Virginia Patterson Hensley into the iconic Patsy Cline. Hospitalized at age 13 with a severe throat infection and rheumatic fever, the girl survived with a considerable consolation prize — a sultry alto voice that would make her famous.
Though the rough-hewn Cline had no intention of warbling solely about lost love, a winning stint on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts would cement her future. The show’s producer, Janette Davis, suggested Cline swap dungarees and cowgirl fringe for a sophisticated cocktail dress while performing the unreleased single “Walkin’ After Midnight.” The song became a hit, followed by other bluesy, lovelorn torchers that Cline often vehemently resisted, including her signature song, the Willie Nelson-penned “Crazy,” which Cline recorded in a single take while recovering from a near-fatal car crash she was involved in two months earlier.
While still hospitalized, Cline wanted to meet Loretta Lynn after hearing over the radio Lynn’s performance of “I Fall to Pieces,” which she dedicated to Cline. Instant friends, Cline plied her cash-strapped pal with advice, food and hand-me-downs, including a pair of undies that Lynn proudly wore for years and once displayed in her Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum.
Enter The First Lady Of Country Music
While Lynn sang feverishly about the travails of modern womanhood, and Cline begrudgingly made magic from heartbreak, Tammy Wynette longed to sing unapologetically about the lasting love she craved. Her biggest solo hits, the lovelorn “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and “Stand by Your Man,” were released as the women’s liberation movement was heating up, the latter in particular making her an easy target for feminists. But plenty of American ladies — the same ones Lynn sang about in “One’s on the Way” — saw themselves in the songs, buying Wynette’s records and making her a star.
Wynette — who enjoyed lazy, girls-only vacations with Lynn to escape the pressures of stardom — knew of which she sang. She was a twice-divorced mother of three when she married fellow country music superstar George Jones in 1969, earning her the nickname “the First Lady of Country Music.” The duo recorded some of country’s most iconic duets, grounded in the joys and agonies of marriage, before they split in 1975.
“I Will Always Love You”
At the same time, another beautiful blonde with big hair and big ambitions navigated her way through a loving but rocky musical partnership. Fueled by a tightknit family, a staunch belief in her talent and an unfailing determination to succeed, Dolly Parton eventually caught the attention of country star Porter Wagoner, who took the pretty, newlywed 21-year-old under his wing, making her a regular performer on his popular variety show and teaching her much about the realities of the industry.
The seven-year partnership outlasted Parton’s patience for being half of a duo. She penned her signature “I Will Always Love You” as a loving — and peacemaking — farewell to her beloved friend. Then, true to her upbringing, Parton displayed a dazzling business and musical savvy, parlaying her bombshell looks, sparkling wit and disarming intelligence into a multifaceted career that continues to thrive after more than 60 years.
In 1993, Wynette, Parton and Lynn celebrated their decades-long friendship and shared musical journey with the Grammy-nominated hit album Honky Tonk Angels. Their collective musical influence lives on across the airwaves from Barbara Mandrell’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” to Reba McEntire’s “I’m a Survivor” to Mindy McCready’s “Guys Do It All the Time” to Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Miranda Lambert’s “White Liar.”
“Only we can understand each other, understand the issues and stuff that happens to women,” Lambert told the concert industry trade publication Pollstar. “Because it is different.”
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