* Wells broke new ground for female country singers
* Awarded Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991
(Corrects Wells’ birth name, first reference to Johnny Wright)
By Tim Ghianni
NASHVILLE, July 16 (Reuters) – Kitty Wells, the “Queen of
Country Music” who opened the door to a host of female country
music headliners, died on Monday at her home in Nashville of
complications from a stroke. She was 92.
Among those mourning her passing was Loretta Lynn, whose own
rise to popularity came after Wells, who paved the way for
strong female voices in country music. “Kitty Wells will always
be the greatest female country singer of all times,” said Lynn
in a statement released on her web site.
“She was my hero. If I had never heard of Kitty Wells, I
don’t think I would have been a singer myself. I wanted to sound
just like her, but as far as I am concerned, no one will ever be
as great as Kitty Wells.
“She truly is the Queen of Country Music.”
Wells, born as Ellen Muriel Deason, actually began
performing on local radio in Nashville, but her ascent to stage
stardom began in 1937 with husband Johnnie Wright, half of the
duo Johnnie & Jack. He died in 2011.
She was the first female singer to reach the top of the
country charts with her 1952 song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky
Tonk Angels,” an answer to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of
Life,” which made the argument God indeed makes such angels.
Wells was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in
1976.
“Kitty Wells was a 33-year-old wife and mother when her
immortal recording of ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’
suddenly made her a star,” according to the Hall of Fame’s
biography.
“Other female country singers of her day were trying their
hands at hard-living, honky-tonk songs, but it was the intense
and piercing style of Kitty Wells, with her gospel-touched
vocals and tearful restraint that resonated with country
audiences of the time and broke the industry barriers for
women,” it said.
Wells was born in Nashville to a musical family. She first
began performing on the radio with her two sisters and a cousin,
the quartet going by the name of the Deason Sisters.
She married Wright in 1937 and joined by her husband and his
sister, Louise, to perform as Johnnie Wright and the Harmony
Girls. Two years later, Wright began performing with Jack Anglin
as the duo Johnnie & Jack.
While she performed with them as a girl singer in the 1940s,
her husband began calling her “Kitty Wells,” a name taken from a
19th century folk song.
‘SWEET, GENTLE LADY’
Harold Bradley, 86, the venerable Nashville session
guitarist whose brother, Owen Bradley, produced many of Wells’
recordings, said there was no better person to work with than
Wells.
“I worked a lot of her sessions, of course, that Owen
produced,” said Bradley, the most-recorded guitarist in history.
“She was the most sweet, gentle lady. She always knew her songs
when she came in and she was very easy to work with.”
In addition to “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,”
which sold 800,000 copies in its initial release in the summer
of 1952, according to the Hall of Fame biography, Wells sang
“Release Me,” “Making Believe,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” among
other classic songs.
She garnered 35 Billboard Top Ten records and 81 charted
singles.
Michael McCall, writer and editor at the Country Music Hall
of Fame and Museum, said Wells’ importance to the emergence of
women singing hit records “cannot be overstated.”
He said Wells proved to the industry that a woman singer
could sell and headline big shows.
“She opened the doors for everybody that came after her,”
McCall said. “It was just a huge shift in how things were
perceived. It was so important that it happened.”
He said Honky Tonk Angels was controversial at the time, and
some radio stations wouldn’t play it. She wasn’t allowed to sing
the song on the NBC segment of the Grand Ole Opry when it first
came out.
“The fans rallied around her to prove the record industry
wrong,” said McCall.
“She was one of the major recording artists of the 1950s and
into the 1960s,” said McCall. “She has had so many country
classics and so many songs that came from a woman’s point of
view that were often about wayward and faithless men.”
Her straightforward manner and subject matter was a major
influence on the song-writing and singing of Lynn and Dolly
Parton, setting the stage for today’s female country stars.
“We live in an age when people over-sing so much and put so
much emphasis on the emotion. She showed sometimes it’s more
emotional by having restraint rather than trying to oversell
it,” said McCall.
Among her many honors, she was given the Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award in 1991, the same year as Bob Dylan and John
Lennon were so honored.
She was just the third country singer to be get that most
prestigious award, after Hank Williams and Roy Acuff.
She finally gave up touring in 2007 and continued to live a
quiet life, so much differently than the subjects of her songs.
(Reporting by Timothy Ghianni; Editing by James B. Kelleher,
Greg McCune and Todd Eastham)
