#Kitty wells tv

Unlike some women in country music – and indeed unlike the heroines of many of her songs – she dressed conservatively and had a sober and scandal-free life.

#Kitty wells tv

But this mattered little to the female fans whom she had gathered over the past decade: they turned up at her engagements, watched her syndicated TV programme and bought her book of favourite songs and recipes. Decca so valued her that they signed her to a lifetime contract, though after Will Your Lawyer Talk to God (1962) she was less of a presence in the country charts. 'On Wells's records,' wrote the country-music historian Mary Bufwack, 'sorrowful men and women acted out their emotional dramas through her plaintive vocals accompanied by a crying steel guitar.'īy the end of the 50s, Wells had had more than 30 top 10 records in the Billboard country charts, and was billed as the 'Queen of Country Music'. Wells issued another communique from the dark side of town, Paying for That Back Street Affair sang duets with Red Foley such as One By One and As Long As I Live and had further hits with Making Believe, I Can't Stop Loving You, Mommy for a Day and Heartbreak USA – songs that skilfully evoked both the lure of sin and the comfort of repentance. 'Answer songs' had long been a staple of country music, and an enterprising songwriter in Louisiana, JD Miller, had the notion of redeploying the tune for a woman's riposte: it was not women's frailties, but uncaring men, that were responsible for the soiled doves of the backstreets – 'From the start most every heart that's ever broken/ Was because there always was a man to blame.' Wells's recording of this anthem to the honky tonk angel, although banned by the NBC network as suggestive, and for a time excluded too from the Opry, was a huge hit, ruling the country charts for weeks and reportedly selling more than three-quarters of a million discs. It was set to the melody of both a tender old country song of separated lovers, I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes, and – even more incongruously – Roy Acuff's scriptural hit of the 30s, The Great Speckled Bird. In 1952, after Johnnie & Jack's hit recording Poison Love, the Opry stage was theirs too.Īnother hit country record of that year was Hank Thompson's The Wild Side of Life, a man's song about a woman who rejects friends and loved ones for a life in 'the places where the wine and liquor flows'. Up to that point she had been using her birth name, but Wright conferred on her the more resonant Kitty Wells, a name drawn from an old song.Īfter the second world war, Johnnie, Jack and Kitty secured a place in the cast of the Louisiana Hayride, which at that time was second only to the Grand Ole Opry as a shop window of country music talent. A couple of years later, Wright and Jack Anglin formed a duet act, Johnnie & Jack, and she toured with them in the then conventional role of the 'girl singer'.

In 1937 she married Johnnie Wright and sang with him and his sister. She came from a musical family, had learned to sing and play guitar, and got some experience of performing on radio in a family quartet. Born Ellen Muriel Deason in Nashville, Tennessee, she left school in her teens, in the Depression-hit early 30s, and took a job ironing shirts. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976 and in 1991, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award – an honor only two other country performers, Hank Williams and Roy Acuff, have ever received.The road to that hit had been a long one. In her 27-year career, 84 of Wells’ singles appeared on the country charts, with 38 of them making it to the Top Ten. Wells’ long career included stints playing with her husband Johnnie Wright and making appearances on hit radio shows like “Louisiana Hayride” and the Opry in 1968, she had her own syndicated television show and in 1974, she made a record with members of the Allman Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band. The NBC radio network deemed the track “suggestive” and banned it the Grand Ole Opry initially wouldn’t let Wells perform the track but ultimately changed their minds.īorn Muriel Ellen Deason in Nashville on August 30th, 1919, Wells grew up listening to a mix of Grand Ole Opry and gospel music. Miller-penned words for “It Wasn’t God…” became an anthem for women in a post-war America marked by rising divorce rates and changing sexual norms. A counter to Hank Thompson’s Number One hit “Wild Side of Life” – a track in which the singer blamed the woman he picked up at a bar for ruining his life – the J.D.