Artist Biography - Tammy Wynette

Tammy Wynette


	Home Biographies On The Fringe Artist Profile Archives News Flash Message Board Reader's Poll Fan Pics Photo Album Merchandise Artist Websites Related Sites Website Resources Contact Us Get the latest Countrypolitan news! Join our mailing list today! Click Here				She's the fabric of legends, but cut from soft cloth. With her ten-foot-tall name strung from Carnegie Hall to the Boone County Fair, she weaved country music with her distinctive designs: a heart stitched for lovers, a tear tacked for losers, a cross sewn for those whose own courage is spent. Her name shouts from the top of the music charts and glows from the tips of reviewers' pens. Critics call her a legend, fans say she's a heroine, but the names she loved most are what she was first: Tammy Wynette, a wife and a mother. The size of a schoolgirl, The First Lady of Country Music seems a curious giant. The woman with the towering name and 30 year fame has confronted and conquered more heartaches than most while building a name she could hang from a star. In what seems like another life far from the present, Tammy was living in a rundown, 60-year-old, three room log house on a Mississippi farm with no indoor plumbing, no way to pump water and no stove. She cooked in an open fireplace, carried water from a spring down the hill and boiled diapers in an iron pot over a backyard fire. "Stand By Your Man" is no longer just a recording. It's also the title of Tammy's best-selling autobiography, published in hardback by Simon & Schuster in 1979 and in paperback by Pocket Books in 1980. The book has been praised by fans and critics alike, who feel it's an absorbing and honest view of Tammy's life from birth to her marriage to George Richey. It aired as a CBS-TV movie special May 13, 1981, and starred Annette O'Toole in the role as Tammy. Much of Tammy's time (averaging 15 days each month) was spent crisscrossing the country in a luxurious $500,000 custom designed bus called the "First Lady," she was followed by her band and crew on a second bus referred to as "Tammy 1." Together, they traveled more than 100,000 miles a year to concerts that brought her enthusiastic acclaim nationwide. Chicago Tribune columnist Jack Hurst calls her "...one of the greatest vocal stylists of our time, and of any music." Tammy also performed in Europe and Austraila many times, where many of her albums have been certified gold and platinum. From a naive farm girl totally unfamiliar with the music business until she cut her first single ("Apartment #9") in 1966, Tammy has gone on to sell more than 30 million records, grossing more than $100 million. (Her recording of "Stand By Your Man" is the biggest selling single in the history of country music.) Her releases have made the number one position on the charts some 35 times; she became the first female Country artist to receive one million album; she has won two Grammy's and was the CMA's Female Vocalist in 1968, 1969 and1970. In the U.K. she was honored in 1976 as Number One Female Vocalist in all Great Britain. Ireland RTE radio/television network sponsored a public poll in 1980 declared Tammy to be Ireland's Country Female Vocalist of the Year. Her professional accomplishments are impressive regardless of her background. However, it's the obstacles that Tammy had to hurdle en route to stardom that makes her story so exceptional and poignant. She was born Virginia Wynette Pugh on May 5, 1942 on her grandfather's farm in Itawamba County, Mississippi. ("Our property crossed the state line," Tammy said, "so I tell people my top half comes from Mississippi and my bottom half from Alabama, and if they're not happy, turn me around.") When she was eight months old her father, a local musician, died of a brain tumor. Her grandparents raised her while her widowed mother found work in a Birmingham defense plant. By age seven, Tammy was working the cotton fields along with other relatives on the farm. "Hoeing, chopping, picking and hating every minute of it," she recalls. Her father's legacy -- a piano, a guitar and the dream that his daughter would make music her life -- became her only escape from the dull, arduous routine of farm life. She endured long, back-breaking hours in the cotton fields by daydreaming of singing before thousands of people. As a teenager her favorite fantasy was one in which she appeared on stage with her singing idol, George Jones. She played piano and sang in church before she started school, and by adolescence had organized a trio which performed on local radio. "I dreamed of being a singer," said Tammy, "but I also wanted to be a housewife and mother, like my girlfriends. I wasn't single-minded in my goal. When two of my best friends got married during our senior year of high school, I mistook infatuation for love and did the same thing. I thought marriage would get me off the farm." It did, but as a teenage bride she found times even harder than she'd known at home. She had two children within three years and her husband, an itinerant construction worker, was unemployed more often than not. They were finally forced to move into an abandoned log house which was rent-free. ("Not even the poorest sharecropper would have paid to live there," Tammy noted. "There were huge cracks between the logs, so we froze in the winter and melted in the summer. I insulated the rooms with cardboard boxes I ripped up and nailed to the walls.") Fed up with poverty and worn out from the drudgery of her life, Tammy enrolled in beauty school in nearby Tupelo, funding her schooling with money given to her by her mother. ( Tammy had kept her beautician's license up to date. "A part of me still thinks getting paid to sing is too good to be true," she confessed. "Having the license means I can always go back to hairdressing.") After becoming a beautician, Tammy moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where she gave birth to a third daughter, a 1 lb. 8 oz. premature baby who suffered a near-fatal bout with spinal meningitis before she was four months old. Her shaky marriage crumbled, and while getting a divorce she worked 10 hour days as a hairdresser, after getting up at 4 a.m. each day to sing on the local "Country Boy Eddie" TV show. During this time she made trips to Nashville whenever she could arrange time off from work to see producers about getting a recording contract. After months of rejections, she made the daring decision to move to Nashville anyway, determined to make an all-out, do-or-die effort to break into the business. When she left Birmingham, Tammy had only two things in her favor -- a born talent (her childhood music teacher has said, "You could just rake the music off that girl.") and a stubborn will to succeed ("I'm a Taurus," she says. "Telling me I can't is like waving a red flag in front of a bull!") She had no friends in Nashville ... no contacts, no knowledge of the music industry (when a producer asked her for a demo tape, she didn't know what he meant), no money, no job, no place to live, and three small children totally dependent on her. The odds were against her sticking it out for a year, and she almost didn't. "We had been living on cornbread, mild and pinto beans for weeks when I met Billy Sherrill," she said. "I was on my last leg, just about ready to give up and go back to a steady job in a beauty shop." Sherrill, the young, innovative boss of Epic, then a new subsidiary of Columbia and CBS, had only to hear Tammy sing three songs before he agreed to record her. Now one of Nashville's principal record producers, songwriters and starmakers, Sherrill still regards Tammy as his greatest discovery, and the day she walked into his office as one of the luckiest in his career. Tammy was just as eager and enthusiastic in return in complimenting Billy Sherrill. Her first single, "Apartment #9," was released within weeks, hitting the charts almost as soon as it hit the record racks. Her next 11 albums went to number one and within four short years, Tammy had won two Grammys and three times been named Female Vocalist of the Year by CMA. Like her career, Tammy's personal life filled the papers. In 1968 she married her idol, George Jones, creating a union that captured the imaginations of country music fans like no other couple before them. For the next seven years they lived, sang, wrote, recorded and performed in a romantic, stormy, much-publicized relationship that ultimately brought Tammy more headlines than happiness. Jones' drinking sprees were almost as legendary as his music, and it was this problem that eventually destroyed the marriage. ("He couldn't give it up, and I couldn't give in to it," Tammy says of his drinking.) They had one child, Tamala Georgette, born in 1970. Ironically, it wasn't until after her divorce from Jones that Tammy emerged as an exciting, commanding performer in her own right. "When we were married, I depended on George to carry the ball onstage," she admited, "because he was more at ease fooling around with the audience. I only felt comfortable when I was singing. Many months passed before I was able to relax enough to have fun with my audiences." She felt at home with them and used her music to share intimacies that she would have been afraid to share a few years earlier. It is this ability to open the door to her innermost feelings in song that made a Tammy Wynette Show inimitable. As a songwriter, Tammy developed into a formidable talent, not only writing or co-writing many of her own hits, but writing for other artists as well. Two George Jones albums following their divorce contained songs Tammy wrote -- "These Days I Barely Get By" and "I Just Stopped In To See If I Was Gone." Kenny Rogers and Dottie West have cut two of her songs, "That's The Way It Could Have Been" and "Til I Can Make It On My Own" (the latter was first a country and pop chart hit for Tammy herself; Kenny & Dottie's version gave her two #1's on the song). Julie Andrews, Debby Boone and Donna Summer, Tina Turner and many others have also recorded Tammy's material. She composed on both piano and guitar, but prefered piano and was compulsive about finishing a song once the idea had inspired her. She often sat up all night working on a verse or melody until it fell into place just the way she wanted it. By far the most sophisticated performer among country music's female stars, Tammy was equally comfortable on network TV, on a Las Vegas stage or doing a benefit back home in Itawamba County. According to Billy Sherrill, "She rises so far above the other girl singers in country music that you can't even put her in the same category." In her book, "Singers and Sweethearts -- The Women In Country Music," author Joan Dew wrote: "Whenever Tammy performs, auditoriums or nightclubs, the audience is mesmerized... no country music singer conveys emotion more poignantly. Her tearful singing style is the voice of every heartbreak a woman has ever known." And Tammy knew her share. Yet joy somehow always surfaced -- as when she married her longtime friend, George Richey, on July 6, 1978. Richey is well-known songwriter, who has co-written several of Tammy's hits, produced monstrous hits for Tammy and many other artists. A tour through their Nashville home will reveal an awesome number of gold and Platinum albums, CMA awards and BMI awards for both Tammy and Richey. Tammy's schedule of primetime television, concerts and recordings was booked months in advance, with requests for her time far exceeding the number of days available each year. Security, perhaps, that makes her beautician's license just another framed emblem of accomplishment. *From Tammy Wynette's Official Website.*

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