Tammy Wynette
Released: September 1968
Tammy Wynette at a Nashville recording studio with producer Billy Sherrill (c. 1970).
Courtesy of Cathy Sherrill Lale
The modern female country singer can be traced back to Kitty Wells. Born in Nashville, Wells had her first hit—“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”—in 1952. The song was a protofeminist response to Hank Thompson’s hit “The Wild Side of Life,” in which the song’s protagonist blamed the woman he picked up at a bar for wrecking his marriage. What set Wells apart from the female country singers who preceded her was a low-twang approach, leaning more heavily on a warm folk sound in her voice than the more typical country and western inflection. Wells’s dignified image and string of hits encouraged Nashville labels to sign more female country singers.
Female vocalists who followed Wells in the 1950s included Jean Shepard, Skeeter Davis, Betty Foley, Patsy Cline, and Connie Smith, whose 1964 hit “Once a Day,” about grieving for a lost love, reached No. 1 on the country chart and remained there for eight weeks. Smith became the first female country artist to top the chart with a debut single, and the song was the longest-running No. 1 hit on the Billboard chart by a female country artist up until then.
Smith’s rapid success wasn’t lost on Tammy Wynette, a hairdresser from Mississippi who came to Nashville in 1966. After winning over top producer Billy Sherrill, she had a series of hits about women struggling to make their relationships work. In 1968, Wynette recorded “Stand By Your Man,” a song that urged women to overlook the flaws of their boyfriend or husband and to instead focus on the good he provides. In 1968, the song became a No. 1 country hit for three weeks, and then crossed over to the pop chart, where it reached No. 19. The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
Interviews with BILLY SHERRILL (cowriter and producer), HARGUS “PIG” ROBBINS (pianist), and JERRY KENNEDY (guitarist)
Billy Sherrill: In 1966, I had just started working as a producer at Epic Records in Nashville. One day in August, the office receptionist buzzed and said there was a woman there named Virginia Pugh who wanted to talk to me about writing songs. I was busy, so the woman sat outside my office and waited. Finally, she got up and just walked in. She didn’t have any tapes, so I gave her my guitar to play. She had a fine voice, but I didn’t have anything going on at the moment for her. I asked her to leave me her number and I’d give her a call. The poor girl just wilted. She left and wound up going to see a producer friend of mine at another label. He later called me and sort of bragged about not being very nice to her. I felt bad.
By then I had heard a single by Bobby Austin called “Apartment #9.” I called Virginia in and played it for her. I said, “If you learn this song, we’ll record it.” A week later she came to the Quonset Hut—a now famous recording studio in Nashville owned by Owen Bradley. When I put on Bobby’s single of “Apartment #9” so the guys could learn the chords, Virginia listened. Then we recorded. After she finished, the guys just looked around. They were amazed. Guitarist Jerry Kennedy came up to me after and said, “Do you realize what you’ve got here?”
I signed Virginia right away, but I asked her to change her name. I said, “Look, don’t get mad, but ‘Pugh’ is a horrible name.” She said, “What do you want to call me?” I had just seen this old movie called Tammy and the Bachelor with Debbie Reynolds. “Tammy” sounded friendly. I said, “Let’s take your middle name—Wynette—and make it your last, and let’s put ‘Tammy’ in front of it.” She said, “Sounds good to me.”
I began producing Tammy exclusively, and we had a hit in ’66, two No. 1s in ’67, and another No. 1—“D-I-V-O-R-C-E”—in early ’68. The goal was to keep the streak going. For some time, I had been carrying around a folded sheet of paper in my wallet with chords and lyrics to a song I wrote. My title was, “I’ll Stand By You”—but it didn’t sound right for Tammy. She needed a twist. I reworked the lyrics so the story came from the perspective of a woman singing to another woman—as if she were giving advice to a friend who was a little unsure about how to hold on to her man.
In August 1968, when Tammy was in the studio for a recording session, she and I went up to my office on a break. I had an old upright piano in there, and Tammy sat on the bench next to me while I played and sang. She liked the song and changed a few lines. I said, “Do you want to hear it again?” She said, “No, why don’t we go downstairs and record this thing?” Back in the studio, I played and sang the song a few more times for the band—Pete Drake on pedal steel guitar, Ray Edenton on guitar, “Pig” Robbins on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and Buddy Harman on drums.
Hargus “Pig” Robbins: I’ve been blind since I was a kid. A teacher gave me my nickname after I became dirty playing on the fire-escape slide at my blind school. The name sort of stuck. At the Quonset Hut, I played a Steinway Grand Model B. They put Tammy right behind me and the choir a little more distant—so her voice and theirs would wrap around me. The bass and drums were to my left and the guitar was on my right, with the pedal steel guitar a little farther away.
I had been recording with Tammy for a couple of years by then, but I had no idea what she looked like. What came out through her lungs was enough to tell me what kind of soul she had—especially on that song’s chorus.
Sherrill: When we recorded, the guys didn’t use a formal arrangement, just numbers—like 1-1-1-5 and 5-5-5-1 and so on. The numbers stood for chords. If we played in the key of C, then No. 1 would be C. This allowed us to change keys if we had to without transposing the music. When the song ended, it was like a graveyard. Everyone just sat there and looked at each other. Someone finally broke the ice by saying, “Damn.” Tammy started laughing when she realized that everyone was as much in love with the song as she was.
When we listened to the playback, I was awestruck by her voice. But in the days of singles and radio, the opening was critical. Pete [Drake] had kicked it off with his wonderful pedal steel guitar, but to me the sound gave away too much. Tammy said, “Let’s try something else,” and she was right.
Jerry Kennedy: I wasn’t on the original session. Billy called me to do it but I was in Chicago that day. When I came back to town two days later, Billy played me the tape. He wanted something less obvious at the start—the simpler the better, so Tammy could grab the song away from the musicians. Billy had me overdub the opening, and I came up with a simple riff. I used my 1961 Gibson ES-335, which had a real big, manly sound. Billy also had me overdub lines here and there to support Tammy’s vocal and add flavor.
Sherrill: How a record sounded on the radio meant everything back then. The radio did strange things to music, and I didn’t want the single to sound too twangy or too flat. Before I approved the final mix, I sent an acetate disc to a disc-jockey friend at WKDA in Nashville and asked him to play it. He agreed to do that for me, and when the time came for it to air, I went out and sat in my black 1953 Buick to listen on the radio. When I heard the song, I loved its snap.
A few weeks ahead of the single’s release, I called a friend at Epic in New York and told him the song was going to be big. He played the single up there at their weekly promo meeting, and they loved it. After the record came out, Epic took out a full-page trade-magazine ad. All it said was, “Tammy Wynette’s Answer to Women’s Lib” and the name of the record. But that was just media and marketing hype.
Women’s lib never entered my mind. Or Tammy’s. Tammy was already liberated. Even in ’68, with her early hits, she continued to drive back and forth to Iuka, Mississippi, where she lived and was a hairdresser. Throughout her career, up until her death in 1998, she always kept up her hairdressing license, in case things went sour. “You never know,” she’d say.