Tammy Wynette was known as "The First Lady of Country Music" from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Writer and artist Steacy Easton knows more about Wynette than we’ll ever know. They are the author of "Why Tammy Wynette Matters."
Easton explains how Wynette's feminine persona matched the themes of her songs — devotion, romantic redemption and the heartbreak of loneliness.
Although Wynette came across as glamorous in her public performances, things were different behind the scenes. Easton said that Wynette faced a lot of troubles offstage.
"I think that she had an enormous amount of difficulty with her medical situation towards the end of her life," Easton told Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA."
"She had tumultuous personal relationships outside of the (five) marriages. The only place that she was in control was in the studio," they said.
The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Doug Gordon: Wynette's first solo country No. 1 song was "I Don’t Wanna Play House," released in 1967. What’s your take on this song?
Steacy Easton: I love that she started a career with a refusal, a negative, which is fantastic, and is the originating of all of the rest of her great themes.
This incredibly sad song — it's a song about interiority, about having a relationship with her kids and having that relationship strained. And it has a wonderful performance of that difficult little hitch at the end.
She had a deep career and a complex career. But it's good. It's good to have your themes clear and precise from the outset.
DG: Another one of Wynette's early hits was "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad." And you say that this song has a more complex sexual subtext than it appears to on the surface. Can you tell us a bit about this subtext?
SE: It's the line, "I'm gonna be the swingingest swinger." It's such a great line, a willingness to commit to a pleasure inside the house that had previously been exterior to the house.
There's always been this sort of inside/outside dualism in country music between the home front and the honky-tonk, where it was very careful not to cross streams, so to speak. And I love the sort of unrelenting desire for that — to keep Wynette's character in the song, to keep everything. She'll let the honky-tonk inside. She'll let all the more pleasure seeking that occurs within a honky-tonk to happen in her space, including — I think hinted with that "swingingest swinger" line — perhaps stepping outside of marriage.
DG: Wynette's legendary producer Billy Sherrill and Wynette co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" in 1968, supposedly in 20 minutes. It was a big hit, but also her most controversial song. How did people react to it?
SE: It was nitroglycerin for the cultural arts, and it was interpreted badly often. But I think also Wynette, in a very complex way, allowed for its misinterpretation.
I think as a queer critic who doesn't put a lot of stock in the kind of heteronormative, mainstream relationships, I want the song to be more ambivalent than it is, and I could make an argument that it's ambivalent.
But I also think that for especially working-class women who didn't have their stories told or didn't have the values told, that ambition to have a single partner for their entire lives is validated. And I think that's important.
However, I also think that it was a song that was profoundly reactionary and also actively encouraged that kind of reactionary moment until much later where she made an argument that people misinterpreted it. But also, the subtext just becomes so culturally monolithic and so huge that they become the culture instead of the performer. And I think that's also what happened with the narrative at the end of it.
DG: In 1991, Tammy collaborated with the British band The KLF for a music video called "Justified and Ancient (Stand by the Jams)." It was an international hit. What did you make of it the first time you saw and heard it?
SE: It was amazing. It wasn't my first encounter with Wynette, but it was my first encounter with the KLF and that kind of very British "we are being very serious, but we are also doing this for the arts and craft camp of it" — and this tone where you're never exactly sure who's making the joke at whose expense.
DG: In the very last paragraph of your book, you say, "As a trans person, I don't want to give Wynette over to the transphobes and the homophobes." That sentence really struck me. Can you tell us a bit about that?
SE: I think there are queer ways of looking at the world. I think there are trans ways of looking at the world. I think that there are ways of looking at the world that prioritize an idea that gender is performative and that gender is something that you, as Tammy Wynette says in (the song) "Womanhood," "step into or step out of."
I think with the way the discourse is going right now, in a way that makes me feel really scared and really sad that the assumption is that gender is something that queer folk or trans folk do, that only queer and trans folk can transfer from gender. And if we can police or destroy how queer folks and trans folks perform gender, then gender will never be performed again.
And I think you have to look very carefully on at gender and Wynette and say no — that they are performing gender as much as we are, that gender is always something that is profoundly acted within a culture, that gender is always something that is played with or messed with or adhered to. And I think that nothing is natural and everything is acted. And those things have physical as well as cultural and emotional consequences.