![]() ![]() The latter, it should be noted, proved to be a key part of Wells’ enduring popularity throughout a performing and recording career that spanned nearly a half-century and earned her the title of the Queen of Country Music. Eventually, however, the Opry decision-makers changed their tune, “in part because of the song’s popularity and Ms. Wells’ record, deeming it ‘suggestive,’ and officials at the Grand Ole Opry would not at first let her perform it on their show,” recalled The New York Times writer Bill Friskics-Warren in his admiring obituary for the Nashville songbird. To be sure, it was a song that struck many in 1950s America as envelope-pushing and borderline offensive. ![]() Long before Loretta Lynn scandalized many of her fans with “The Pill” and “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and Miranda Lambert put the smack down on abusive good ol’ boys with “Gunpowder & Lead,” Wells, who passed away July 16, 2012, at age 92, sounded a proto-feminist note in a quietly defiant riposte to male chauvinism. I just thought it was another song.”īut “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” turned out to be something much more than that. As she told a writer for the Nashville Scene weekly newspaper: “I wasn’t expecting it to make a hit. She would later say she relented only because of the $125 union scale fee she would receive for the recording session. In the original song, Thompson bemoans his wife’s cheating ways and accuses his wandering spouse of carousing in bars “where you wait to be anybody’s baby and forget the truest love you’ll ever know.” The answer song counters by claiming “too many married men think they’re still single” and have “caused many a good girl to go wrong.” And then, for good measure: “From the start, most every heart that’s ever broken was because there always was a man to blame.”ĭubious about the song’s commercial prospects and concerned about lyrics that seemed, by 1950s standards, a tad salacious, Wells more or less had to be talked into recording the song. Nothing much had come of the albums she had recorded for RCA Victor, and she repeatedly banged her head against the glass ceiling of what then passed for conventional wisdom in the music business: Women simply couldn’t sell records or draw concertgoers on their own.Īround this time, however, she was approached by a Decca Records executive to record “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” a slightly risqué but instantly memorable tune that served as a kind of “answer song” to Hank Thompson’s No. While his wife was performing as the “girl singer” in the duo’s shows, it was Wright who suggested that she use the stage name Kitty Wells (drawn from the title of a 19th-century folk song).īy 1952, however, she was ready to give up the name and her own chances for fame. The following year, she married Johnnie Wright, an up-and-coming country music artist who would achieve fame (alongside Jack Anglin) as half of the popular duo Johnnie & Jack. She grew up listening to those old-time country sounds during weekly Grand Ole Opry broadcasts and made her own radio debut as a performer in 1936. One of the relatively few country music icons who could actually claim Nashville as a birthplace, she was born Ellen Muriel Deason on August 30, 1919, and learned to play the guitar at 14. Kitty Wells was 33 years old - and on the verge of quitting showbiz altogether to become a full-time wife and mother - before she became an overnight sensation. The original queen of country music blazed a trail for women performers.
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