By Pat Harris
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Reuters) - Tammy Wynette, who died Monday
in her sleep at her Nashville home, rose from poverty in the Alabama
cotton fields
to become the first woman in country music to sell more than a million
copies, for
her 1968 hit ``Stand By Your Man.''
Wynette
was 55. Her spokeswoman, Evelyn Shriver, said she died while
napping on her couch and added that it was believed she died of a blood
clot.
Wynette
and the sentiments expressed in her best-known hit song were scornfully
cited by Hillary Rodham Clinton in a CBS ''60 Minutes'' television
interview before the
1992 U.S. presidential elections.
The
future first lady said she was not defending her husband from adultery
accusations because she was ``some little woman standing by my man
like Tammy
Wynette.'' After outraged protests from country music fans and from
Wynette herself,
Mrs. Clinton telephoned the country singer to apologize.
``The First
Lady of Country Music'' won three Country Music Association (CMA)
awards for top female vocalist and two Grammy awards for pop music
in her fight for
recognition in a tough industry.
In
January 1996 she received the Award of Merit from the American Music Awards.
She once said her only regret in her remarkable career was not winning
the CMA Entertainer
of the Year award.
Wynette
recorded her first single in 1966, and within three years, won her first
Grammy.
Her biggest hits, in addition to ``Stand By Your Man,'' were ''Two-Story
House,'' ``D-I-V-O-R-C-E,''
and ``I Don't Wanna Play House.''
In
all she recorded more than 50 albums and sold more than 30 million records.
Born Virginia Wynette Pugh on May 5, 1942, in Red Bay, Alabama, she
was working
in cotton fields on her grandfather's farm by age 7.
At
17 she married her first husband, Euple Byrd, an itinerant construction
worker,
and lived in an abandoned log house with no plumbing or electricity
and cardboard
''insulation'' on the cabin walls.
After
the birth of her third child, Wynette divorced Byrd and moved to Birmingham
to become a beautician. She began singing on an early morning TV show
and making trips to
Nashville to knock on doors along the city's famed Music Row.
She
moved to Nashville with her children, where she once told a reporter, ``We
lived
on cornbread, milk and pinto beans.''
Although
``Stand By Your Man'' also was the title of Wynette's best-selling 1979
autobiography, the singer's life was marked by four failed marriages.
Much
of the publicity spotlighted her troubled marriage, her third, to country
superstar
George Jones, with whom she recorded some of her biggest hits, such
as ``Golden Ring.''
After
their divorce, Wynette went solo, although she recorded ``Two Story House''
with her ex-husband in 1980. She and Jones were reunited on an album
titled ``One'' in 1995
and did concert tours together in recent years.
Wynette suffered from chronic ill health and had
surgery on her bile duct in 1992. Shriver
said Wynette had been in good health recently and had been performing
in concerts.
In
March the singer won a privacy dispute with the Star and National Enquirer
tabloids
in a federal court case that resulted in an out-of court settlement.
The terms were never disclosed.
She
had accused the tabloids of stealing or paying for her hospital records
and
exaggerating her bad health when she was treated at a hospital in Pittsburgh.
She charged
invasion of privacy.
Speaking
of her own failed marriages, Wynette once said: ``I was never raised to
marry
and divorce. A lot of it was because I wanted to be a singer
and my husbands wanted something
different.''
Other
low points were bankruptcy problems, a spate of mysterious fires at her
mansion
and a brief, still unsolved kidnapping from a Nashville shopping center
in the 1970s.
Wynette married her fifth husband, her manager George Richey, in 1978.
Her
1992 ``Justified and Ancient'' single with Britain's dance-pop act, the
KLF, was
an international hit and reached the Top 10 on U.S. charts.
In
October 1993 she joined Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn in ''Honky Tonk Angels''--
an album featuring the three country legends.
In
addition to her husband, Wynette is survived by her four daughters, Gwen,
Jackie,
Tina and Georgette, a step-daughter Georgie, a stepson Richie, and
several grandchildren.
REUTERS@
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- She grew up picking cotton in
Mississippi, worked as a beautician and sang for the people
who, like her, knew about hardship and heartache.
Tammy Wynette, whose hits included the classic country ode
"Stand by Your Man," died Monday at age 55 while napping at
her Nashville home.
The cause of her death was believed to be a blood clot,
spokeswoman Evelyn Shriver said. Wynette had had a series of
health problems in recent years.
"Her story is really the story of country music," said Kyle
Young of the Country Music Foundation. "From humble
beginnings as a hairdresser, to superstardom.
"The strength of her music was she connected with a wide
audience, because she really tapped into real situations in
people's lives," he said.
Wynette scored many duet hits with George Jones, her husband
from 1969-75. They tended to be about either domestic bliss or
strife, as did solo Wynette hits like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and "My
Man." She had a robust voice that could deliver entire songs
seemingly on the verge of tears.
Wynette recorded more than 50 albums and sold more than 30
million records, scoring 39 Top 10 hits from 1967-88. Twenty
topped the charts.
Country music fans polled for the annual Music City News
awards voted Wynette a legend in 1991. She said it was
premature.
"I don't consider myself a legend. I think it's kind of overused,"
said Wynette, who was known as "the first lady of country
music."
She was a three-time winner of the Country Music
Association's female vocalist of the year award -- 1968 to
1970. Only Reba McEntire has won the honor more times, with
four.
She was born Virginia Wynette Pugh on a cotton farm in
Itawamba County, Miss., and worked in the fields as a child.
She later worked as a waitress, a doctor's receptionist, a
barmaid and a shoe factory worker.
In the mid-1960s, she was working as a beautician in
Birmingham, Ala., and making periodic 180-mile trips to
Nashville in hopes of getting discovered as a singer.
Billy Sherrill, who co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" with
Wynette, signed her to Epic Records and produced her pivotal
early hits. Other hits included "I Don't Wanna Play House,"
"Womanhood," "Take Me to Your World," "Your Good Girl's
Gonna Go Bad," and "The Ways to Love a Man."
The genius of "Stand By Your Man" was how Wynette's tearful
voice undercut the lyrics, capturing the pain of a woman
struggling to be true to a man who probably didn't deserve it.
"She was as soulful a singer as I've ever heard," said producer
Don Was, who has worked with Willie Nelson and Bonnie
Raitt. "In her own way, she was every bit as soulful as someone
like Aretha Franklin."
Added country singer Patty Loveless: "When Tammy opened
her mouth, it was the soul of country music. ... Tammy, Dolly
(Parton) and Loretta (Lynn) -- that was, and always will be, the
heart of this music."
Throughout Wynette's 25-year career, stormy marriages and
hospital stays threatened to overshadow one of the most
successful singing stories in country music history. In 1978, she
was abducted at a Nashville shopping center, driven 80 miles in
her luxury car, beaten and released by a masked assailant. No
one was ever arrested, though Wynette later said the man
apparently ended up in prison for another crime.
Wynette's personal life settled down that year when she married
her fifth and final husband, George Richey. In 1988, she filed for
bankruptcy as a result of a sour investment in two Florida
shopping centers.
In 1992, her name and best-known song entered the
presidential campaign when Hillary Rodham Clinton, stressing
that her support of her husband was more than routine, said:
"I'm not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man
like Tammy Wynette."
Wynette replied angrily that Mrs. Clinton "offended every true
country music fan and every person who has 'made it on their
own' with no one to take them to a White House." She added
that if she and the Yale-educated Mrs. Clinton ever met, "I can
assure you, in spite of your education, you will find me to be just
as bright as yourself."
Mrs. Clinton said she didn't mean to hurt Wynette's feelings,
and Wynette later performed at a Clinton fund-raiser.
She was hospitalized for various ailments dozens of times, and
admitted in the late 1970s to being dependent on painkilling
drugs. She had several operations in the last 10 years to relieve
recurring inflammation and infections of her bile duct.
Besides husband Richey, Wynette is survived by five daughters,
a son and seven grandchildren.
See
Canoe:
Alabama Hall of Fame Inductee Page
Music Central Online: In Memoriam
Country dot Com: Tammy Biography
