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Hurtin Words Tammy Wynette

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Sometimes its hard to be a biographer. Tammy Wynette is known as the queen of country music, a legend and a drag queen staple.

The first country artist to go platinum, with more than 20 No. 1 hits, she is beloved and rightfully respected, the Elvis of the Opry, a tiny wisp of a woman who went from beauty school to record sales of more than $30 million, a Horatio Alger hero in sequins.

Her appeal springs primarily from two wells: her hardscrabble story and her heartbreaking voice, an idiosyncratic, affecting warble of longing and regret. After youve read Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen, Jimmy McDonoughs rollicking if reverential biography, the voice remains unimpeachable. The story, not so much.

While Wynette the singer warrants extravagant praise her unique interpretations fortifying every song, taking lyrics that would otherwise seem cheesy and transforming them into little odes of devastation Wynette the person is a letdown. If you drained Dolly Parton of her swift wit and Loretta Lynn of her winning pluck, youd get Tammy Wynette, a fairly plain, small-minded gal whose searing ambition and begrudging temperament kept her from any lasting contentment. As McDonough the author of Shakey, a biography of Neil Young describes in striking detail, Wynettes life may have been a heaping helping of trouble, but it was trouble, with few exceptions, she brought on herself.

She was born in Mississippi in 1942, and her childhood was not as abject as she suggested. One friend recalls, Wynette was rich as far as we were concerned, getting $50 for Christmas, never wanting for anything, unlike many neighbors. When she picked cotton, it was as a family chore, not an inevitable career. Her actual poverty came later, after she fled her strict family, marrying a man she hated in order to get back at his brother, whom she loved. She did this at 17, dropping out of high school, a decision that would set the precedent for many equally unwise choices.

In her autobiography, Stand by Your Man, Wynette depicts her first husband, Euple Byrd, as a layabout who held her back. In reality, McDonough discovered, Byrd was a simple, upstanding boy who found himself tied to a wild colt. Wynette, dreams deferred, considered married life dull, drab and exhausting.

Though she would ultimately marry five men most significantly George Jones, with whom she sang perhaps the finest country duets recorded Wynette was ill suited for the compromises domestic relationships required.

She was even less adept at child rearing. When her nanny contacted her on tour, concerned about the kids, an annoyed Wynette snipped, If you need me, call my lawyer. Her four girls were frequently neglected in her pursuit of fame, though she did mine her failings for material, writing Dear Daughters, a spoken-word number reciting the milestones in her girls lives that shed missed, a song that never failed to bring the crowds to tears.

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