Why Tammy Wynette Matters
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How Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance.
With hits such as “Stand By Your Man” and “Golden Ring,” Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity. But there were other sides to the first lady of country. Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette’s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art.
Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about—fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness. Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician’s license. Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette’s performance of “Apartment #9”—and it’s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written. Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius. Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits.
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Journalist Easton's illuminating debut focuses on the eponymous "First Lady of Country Music," who died in 1998, and how she "made her life into her work." Among other aspects of her subject's complicated history, Easton delves into Wynette's "poor and rural" childhood in northeastern Mississippi, her work as a beautician in her 20s, her skyrocketing music career after signing a record deal with Epic Records in Nashville, her addiction to pain pills, and the string of abusive husbands she married and divorced. Though Wynette often centered her songs around "domestic heartbreak," with "Stand By Your Man," her 1975 superhit, she "took the melodrama of her previous work and pushed it into the national conversation," Easton writes. The song sparked controversy, including when Hillary Clinton made derisive reference to it during her husband's first presidential campaign, an incident that "cratered approval ratings" until Wynette appeared at a political rally to smooth things over. In Easton's view, Wynette's self-conscious persona-building is its own achievement, drawing on her working-class roots and notions of domesticity to present an image so "hermetic and seamless we don't think about it as a kind of art." Combined with in-depth discussions of such hits as "I Don't Wanna Play House" and "Apartment No. 9," Easton paints a riveting portrait of an oft-misunderstood star. Country music fans won't be disappointed.
