Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music, went to Georgia in 1974 to record with members of Allman Brothers and the Marshall Tucker Band. It was the first time a big-name country hitmaker had cut an entire album with a rock band, but hardly the first time Kitty Wells had done the unexpected.
Capricorn Sound Studios in Macon was the mecca of Southern Rock, the room where, among other things, the Allmans recorded "Ramblin' Man". And yet there, behind the microphone, stood the impeccably coifed Miss Kitty, pushing 55 and as matronly as Mrs. Cleaver, laying down tracks with a bunch of wild-ass longhairs slumped over their drum kits and guitars.
The album that followed, a country-rock affair that included everything from a Bob Dylan song (the title track) to covers of a couple of red-clay soul ballads, was, ironically enough, titled Forever Young. Then again, maybe the title of the record, which has just been reissued by Wells' grandson, wasn't that ironic after all.
Sure, Wells was way out of her element; hell, she could easily have been the mother of any among that hirsute brood. But for her it was also, in many respects, just another gig, albeit one that would anticipate, for better and for worse, Music Row's latter-day fascination with the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Eagles, a predilection that ultimately paved the way for the pop-country boom of the early '90s. In other words, however unlikely the project might have seemed, Forever Young proved but the latest prescient move in what was at that point for Wells a 22-year run of historic feats and firsts, each as unassuming as the next.
Wells' son-in-law, John Sturdivant, had arranged the session with Capricorn honcho Phil Walden, who recruited Dickey Betts and Chuck Leavell of the Allmans, Toy Caldwell of Marshall Tucker, and members of the band Cowboy, yet another Macon mainstay, for the date. They also nabbed Nashville ringer John Hughey, he of the slash-and-burn steel on such angst-ridden Conway Twitty odes as "The Image Of Me" and "How Much More Can She Stand".
Country and rock musicians had, of course, worked together in the studio before. Guitarist Grady Martin, drummer Buddy Harman, piano player Floyd Cramer, and other Nashville A-Teamers had played on hits by the likes of Elvis, the Everlys, and Roy Orbison. And after producer Bob Johnston talked Bob Dylan into making Blonde On Blonde in Nashville, everyone from Rick Nelson to the Byrds started flocking to Music City to cut with the laid-back cats who played "clear as country water." Tracy Nelson, lead singer of the Bay Area band Mother Earth, liked Nashville so well she never left (her Tracy Nelson Country arguably is the best album in this vein).
Other examples could be cited as well, but all are cases of folk, rock, or pop singers being backed by country pickers. By contrast -- and it's a striking contrast -- Wells turned the tables. Hank Williams Jr. & Friends, a record that employed some of the same Southern rockers as hers did, is often said to be the first example of this sort of crossover. But Bocephus didn't go into the studio until 1975, nearly a year after Wells made Forever Young; plus, Hank Jr.'s core band consisted mainly of Nashville and Muscle Shoals session pros.
You could argue that Earl Scruggs' 1971 blowout (Earl Scruggs -- His Family And Friends on Columbia) with Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band beat Wells to the punch. But unlike Wells, Scruggs was no perennial country chartbuster; besides, his album, like the Dirt Band's 1972 Will The Circle Be Unbroken, was more of an event -- an all-star summit that united musicians of various stripes -- than a case of Nashville Skyline in reverse, like Forever Young.
Kitty Wells first broke with convention, as diffidently as she always would, in 1952, the year "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" came out of nowhere to top the country charts for six weeks in a row. Her emergence, in the record's wake, as the first female country superstar of the postwar era was as unlikely, and owed as much to the urging of family, as her 1974 decision to venture down to Macon to "jam" with Dickey Betts and Toy Caldwell.
In 1952, Wells was ready to leave the music business altogether to be a stay-at-home mom. The eight gospel-leaning sides she'd done for RCA in 1949 and '50 had stiffed, and her husband Johnnie Wright, then one-half of Johnnie & Jack (with Jack Anglin), had just scored his first major hit, and an invitation to join the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.
The only reason Wells claims she cut "Honky Tonk Angels" for Decca, and then only at the prompting of her husband and Decca record exec Paul Cohen, was to pocket the $125 union scale the session would pay. An answer to Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side Of Life" written by Louisiana record man J.D. Miller, the record was a hit before Wells even knew it had been released. She got the news when Audrey Williams, Hank Williams' ex, phoned to say she'd heard it on the radio.
"Audrey had been down to Montgomery," Wells remembers, "and she said, 'Girl, you've got a hit on your hands. Every station I've had on coming home from Montgomery was playing your song.'"
Wells is sitting with her husband of 64 years in the living room of their modest, ranch-style home in Madison, Tennessee. Johnnie, now 87 and quite spry at that, is sporting Mickey Mouse suspenders and a bolo tie; Kitty, 82, is wearing black perma-press slacks and a print blouse. "Wright" reads the knocker on the front door, denoting the place where Kitty still cleans and cooks (she's published three country cookbooks). The house is just ten minutes north of downtown Nashville. It's also a stone's throw from the suburban Opry House and right next-door to the late Hank Snow's not-so-sprawling Rainbow Ranch.
Nearly 50 years on, Wells still insists she never expected "Honky Tonk Angels" to come out, much less to "make a hit." Back then, she says, she thought it was "just another song," little more than "the women getting back at the men."
The record was that all right -- and then some. Countering Thompson's contention, in "The Wild Side Of Life," that some women were loose by nature, Wells' rejoinder, charging that slick-talking men had been many a sister's ruin, captured the malaise many women in postwar America were feeling.
When thousands of GIs marched off to World War II a decade earlier, women picked up the slack (and wore the slacks), entering the workforce and gaining a measure of social, financial and, in quite a few cases, sexual independence. But then the men came home and tried to turn back the clock, expecting women to resume their roles as homebodies. Those who didn't became scapegoats, their morals called into question by their newfound freedom.
"It's a shame that all the blame is on us women," Wells mourns in her doleful, mountain-tinged alto to kick off the record's second verse. Almost offhandedly lowering the boom as the chorus rolls around, she adds, "Many men think they're still single/That has caused many a good girl to go wrong." Had the record been cut by one of Wells' brassier peers -- by a bona fide honky-tonk angel such as Rose Maddox or Charline Arthur, say -- it doubtless would have smacked of an endorsement of licentiousness and vanished without a trace, if it got released at all. But nothing about Wells, then a 32-year-old, gingham-clad housewife and mother, was brazen, or even remotely threatening.
The same goes for her stolid performance. Wells was merely empathizing with "fallen" women, expressing a sentiment akin to the Victorian notion of "she's more to be pitied than censured." She wasn't condoning the wild life, and that's the main reason the record topped the country charts. Within weeks she'd become the first solo female singing star on the postwar Opry, and was well on her way to charting an unprecedented (for a woman) 27 consecutive Top 20 country singles.
Song publisher Fred Rose dubbed Wells the "Queen of Country Music" soon enough, a title she held onto by reigning as the top female vocalist in the country trade magazines well into the 1960s. As that tumultuous decade began, not only had Wells opened the doors of Nashville's recording studios to dozens of her singing sisters, but she'd also established herself as a prototype for subsequent generations of country women, from Hazel Dickens and Loretta Lynn to Dolly Parton and Iris DeMent. The only thing surprising about her election, in 1976, to the Country Music Hall of Fame was that she wasn't the first female inductee, a laurel that went to the late Patsy Cline.
Wells is proud of every one of these achievements, but not especially of Forever Young -- at least not when it first came out 27 years ago. It wouldn't quite do to liken the record to This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album: He Doesn't Like It, the 1971 LP that paired the blues colossus with members of the mostly forgotten pop-soul band Rotary Connection. Nevertheless, back in the day, Wells and her husband had sufficient misgivings about the Capricorn project to have it pulled from the market shortly after its release -- and to sue the label, which was counting on the album to launch its new country division, for control of the masters.
"We were afraid it was too modern-sounding," Wells admits. "We didn't think people would accept a record like that, especially when they were used to the other."
The "other" of which Wells speaks is the 70-some-odd hits she had with producer Owen Bradley. Apart from a dalliance with the Nashville Sound during the '60s, most were built around Wells' keening, unadorned vocals and lean, shuffling arrangements spotlighting the fiddle and steel guitar.
"We hesitated for quite awhile about doing the session," adds Wright, who has functioned as his wife's manager and A&R man throughout her career. "Then they came out with 'Forever Young', one of the worst singles. Well, maybe not the worst, but I didn't think it was Kitty's style. We left for Hawaii to visit our nephew the morning after we finished the record and I took a dub to a disc jockey I knew out there. He played it and said, 'This doesn't sound a bit like Kitty Wells!'
"What was more disappointing than anything," Wright says, "was the cover of the album."
"They wanted me to wear a dress from some Hollywood movie," Wells explains, referring the Elizabethan-style gown she wore in the album's original cover photo, presumably to make her look suitably regal. "It had these different colored stripes and a collar that came up around my neck. It just wasn't me. Then they fixed my hair and pulled it all to one side, which wasn't the way I wore it. It wasn't me at all."
No less of an adjustment for Wells was having to learn the songs -- most of them picked by co-producer Johnny Sandlin -- right there at the session. And having to work with a cadre of musicians whose approach to recording could hardly have been more different from that of maestro Bradley and his A-Teamers.
"It was kind of strange working with that band there," Wells confesses, adding that she'd heard of the Allmans, had even heard their records, but hadn't met any of them till then. "I was used to working with all the musicians here in Nashville. We'd meet in the studio, rehearse a song and put it on record. But when we went down [to Macon], they'd get on one song, and play it and play it. They'd fiddle half the night with the same song."
As these comments suggest, the Capricorn crew apparently did a good bit of overdubbing, "patching" parts they liked from one take into another. "It wasn't like we used to do when all the musicians were there in the same room and we'd all record together," Wells says. "I think we got better feeling doing it the old way." These by no means insignificant differences aside, Wells and her Southern Rock counterparts adjusted to each other fairly quickly -- quite literally overnight.
You can hear everyone's comfort level rise from one day to the next, the pickers sounding more in the pocket, Wells singing with greater command. The contrast is most striking on the two numbers they cut in a country-soul vein. Their cover of Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long", recorded the first day, is tentative at best, while their remake of Dan Penn and Chips Moman's waltz-time "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", done the second day, fairly smolders. Other highlights from the second session include "Don't Stop The Honeymoon In My Heart" and "Till I Can Make It On My Own", each a sawdust-and-steel tour de force, with Dickey Betts' Dobro blubbering all over the latter.
The first day, however, was hardly a washout. Wells' remake of Johnnie & Jack's "What About You", done in "straight" as opposed to the three-quarter time of the original, is as good as anything on the record, John Hughey's sobbing steel giving the lie to Kitty's claims of not having to make believe anymore. And though the elegiac title cut, like the Redding cover, is a bit creaky in spots, it's just the sort of benediction you'd expect to hear from a woman of faith who, with her husband, has been active with the same church for more than 50 years.
The lack of ProTools in 1974 notwithstanding, the album is also somewhat in keeping with the kinds of Southern Rock-inflected country albums that the likes of Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, and Deana Carter have recorded in the past decade. And yet it's something few people would have heard had Wells' grandson, John Sturdivant Jr., not convinced his "Memaw" and granddad to let him remix the long-out-of-print album from the original two-track masters.
Even so, the couple still had reservations about letting John Jr. reissue Forever Young on his Junction Records label -- until they heard his remix. "They hadn't listened to the record in ages," Sturdivant says, adding that what he believes his grandparents objected to most on the original album were its Southern Rock overtones. "What I did was try to polish it up and EQ it a little to where it was, you know, was more country sounding," he explains. "But I didn't want to take anything away from the magic of those sessions."
"It's more full now," Wright says, "and you've got more echo on it, more so than they had back then. The way John Jr. rearranged it just made it sound more country. It sounds more like Kitty."
"Kitty," or "Miss Kitty" to virtually everyone but her husband, is, remarkably enough, the only native Nashvillian ever to become a country superstar, not counting second-generation hitmakers such as Lorrie Morgan and Deana Carter. Born Muriel Ellen Deason on August 30, 1919 (her stage name comes from an antediluvian ballad popularized by the Pickard Family), Wells grew up on Wharf Avenue in South Nashville. Her father, a brakeman with the Tennessee Central Railroad, played guitar and sang folk songs. Her mother, a homemaker, used to gather Kitty and her sisters around the kitchen table to sing gospel songs (her brothers were often away, helping out on their granddad's farm).
The Deasons also sang in church, but the music that made the biggest impression on young Muriel was the racket that hoedown bands such as Dr. Humphrey Bate's Possum Hunters and George Wilkerson's Fruit Jar Drinkers were making on the WSM Barn Dance. The family couldn't afford a radio until the 1930s, but every now and then their agent from the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, the show's sponsor, would supply them with tickets to a performance. The Barn Dance, of course, soon became known as the Grand Ole Opry; by the mid-'30s, when the breakdown bands were being supplanted by a new generation of solo stars, Wells counted the likes of Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, and a cowgirl belter named Texas Ruby among her favorites.
By that time, at the height of the Depression, Wells had dropped out of high school to fold and iron shirts for the Washington Manufacturing Company. She'd also embarked on a singing career of her own. Kitty and her cousin Bessie Choate, both in their teens, were working as a duo called the Deason Sisters. They made their radio debut on WSIX in 1936, singing the Carter Family's "Jealous Hearted Me", but the station's brass, feeling the song was too suggestive, pulled the plug on the young women midway through their performance.
"They cut us off the air," Wells recalls. "But the song was real popular; and we got so many requests for it that they finally let us sing it." The station soon gave the duo their own show, to which they often brought along Kitty's sisters Jewel and Mae to round out the act. Even then, family and music were linked inextricably for Wells, just as they've been throughout her career.
Just as important to her early musical development was meeting Johnnie Wright, a young farmer and aspiring musician from nearby Mount Juliet. Wright's sister had just married and moved next door to the Deasons in Nashville. "I had brought my mother and father to visit my sister," he remembers. "We were having lunch and my sister said, 'You know, Johnnie, there's a girl next door that sings some of the prettiest gospel songs you've ever heard. She plays guitar too."
It wasn't long after Johnnie and Kitty met that they started dating, and singing together. That was 1935; two years later they were married. Johnnie worked at a cabinet company and Kitty was still folding shirts at Washington Manufacturing. The couple rented their first house, just a few blocks north of downtown Nashville, for five bucks a month.
Meanwhile, Kitty and her cousin, now joined by Johnnie and his sister Louise, were still singing on WSIX. Now billing themselves as Johnnie Wright & the Harmony Girls, the group also would play little theaters and schoolhouses in towns outlying Nashville on weekends. But when Kitty and Johnnie had their first child, Ruby, in 1939, Kitty stayed home with the baby, and Johnnie formed a Delmore Brothers-style duo with his sister's husband, Jack Anglin.
A dead ringer for the Delmores, in fact. "Jack could play a guitar real good, and I would just follow with the chord," Wright says. "There was no television back then. [Very few people] had ever seen the Delmore Brothers, but they loved 'em, so this guy who worked with me at [the] cabinet company would take us around to restaurants and places, asking people if they'd ever heard of the Delmore Brothers. When they'd say, 'Yeah,' he'd say, 'Hold on, I've got 'em out in the car. So we'd grab our guitars, go in, and sing two or three Delmore Brothers songs. People loved our singing."
So much so that the two men took over the family's morning slot on WSIX; by 1940, they'd packed it in at their day jobs and packed their wives and kids off to Greensboro, North Carolina, to launch a radio show on WBIG. From there they moved, by turns, to Charleston, Knoxville (where they hired a young fiddle player named Chester Burton Atkins; Johnnie is often credited with encouraging Atkins to switch to guitar), Raleigh and, then, back home to Nashville.
In 1947, Johnnie & Jack and their band, the Tennessee Mountain Boys, worked the Opry; they also recorded for the King and Apollo labels, before moving to Shreveport in '48 to help get KWKH's Louisiana Hayride started. Kitty was the featured "girl singer" in the act, as she had been on and off (mostly on) ever since the duo took to the road nearly a decade earlier.
When Johnnie & Jack signed with RCA in '49, Wells also got a contract, the only fruits of which were the eight poorly selling sides she cut in Atlanta in '49 and '50 with the Tennessee Mountain Boys, which then included the great Paul Warren on fiddle. When "Poison Love" took off for Johnnie & Jack in '51 (#4 country), Wells was only too happy to trade the microphone for a pair of apron strings.
"Didn't none of [those records] do any good," Wells says of her RCA sides, including versions of "Gathering Flowers For The Master's Bouquet" and "How Far Is Heaven", a song she later cut with her daughter Carol Sue, and which became one of the most popular and enduring numbers in her stage show.
"They didn't get any distribution," she adds in regard to her ill-fated output for RCA. "It was real hard for anybody to get started back then, so I got off the label after we moved back to Nashville from Shreveport. I was just gonna quit singing and stay at home."
That, however, wasn't to be; once "Honky Tonk Angels" broke things open, Kitty never looked back. "That was the end of my retirement," she muses as impassively as she doubtless responded to her initial success. "And I've been working ever since."
Indeed, Wells headed right back out on the road with Johnnie & Jack, and eventually headlined the show, a move Roy Acuff strongly advised Johnnie against. (After Anglin died tragically in an auto accident on his way to a memorial service for Patsy Cline in 1963, Wells and Wright performed as Kitty Wells & Johnnie Wright & the Tennessee Mountain Boys -- and from time to time with their children -- until they retired from regular touring last year.)
When "Honky Tonk Angels" went nova, Wells embarked on a recording career that would see her place 80 singles on the country charts, including 35 in the Top 10, before the hits quit coming in the early '70s. Among the first were several more answer records -- "Paying For That Backstreet Affair", "Hey Joe", "(I'll Always Be Your) Fraulein" -- and a series of duets (with Red Foley, Webb Pierce, and Roy Drusky). And then, of course, the rash of others that would become stone country classics, among them "Release Me", "Makin' Believe", "Cheatin's A Sin", and "Heartbreak U.S.A.".
Owen Bradley produced all the sides Wells recorded for Decca from 1952 to 1972. She opted out of her "lifetime" contract when Decca became MCA in 1973, after having had five more or less hitless years with the label.
Much as he did with Webb Pierce during the early '50s, Bradley tended to keep Kitty's shuffles lean and gutbucket, the barest essence of sawdust-and-steel honky-tonk. For many sessions, he employed the Tennessee Mountain Boys, the band Wells sang with onstage, the earliest edition of which included Warren on fiddle and the great Shot Jackson on steel guitar.
In contrast to the updated stringband sound of her contemporaries Molly O'Day and Wilma Lee Cooper, the records Wells made with Bradley were tailor-made for the era's jukeboxes. The combination of Kitty's aching vibrato and the keening notes Jackson tortured from the strings of his steel could pierce the din of even the rowdiest Saturday night revelers.
A consummate interpreter, Wells recorded material that cast her in every imaginable role throughout her career, from long-suffering housewife to guilt-ridden sinner. She was at her best, though, when playing the former, as in "Makin' Believe" and "Mommy For A Day", the latter finding Kitty, wrongly accused of infidelity, bemoaning an unjust custody arrangement as fiddles snivel over a chopping shuffle beat. More than mere heartache, the record is the sound of a mother having a piece of her heart cut out.
Yet no matter how or what she sang, Wells' identity as a performer, and as a wife and mother, remained distinct. Not only that, but the disparity, at times, between the life she lived and the one she sang about never seemed to bother her. "I just thought of 'em as songs," she explains. "I just thought of 'em as songs that told a story. A lot of times they were written about something that happened to some[one], about their life. I'd just go in and record 'em, hoping they'd make a hit."
Wells' first hit, of course, flung the doors of Nashville's recording industry wide open for her female counterparts. "Honky Tonk Angels" was still fairly new to the charts when record execs around town started signing women hand over fist. RCA snatched up Charline Arthur, the Davis Sisters and Betty Cody; MGM nabbed Rita Faye and Audrey Williams; King recruited Ann Jones and Bonnie Lou. Even Decca, Wells' own label, got in on the act, landing Goldie Hill, "The Golden Hillbilly."
"It was because of 'Honky Tonk Angels' that I got to sing," says Hill, who had a handful of Top 20 hits during the '50s, including "I Let The Stars Get In My Eyes", a country chart-topper in 1953. Today Hill lives with her husband, honky-tonk legend Carl Smith, on a horse farm just outside Nashville.
"Kitty busted the door wide open, and I happened to be the second girl on Decca at the time," Hill continues. "People got interested in girl singers in a hurry because of Kitty. My brother Tommy was playing with Webb Pierce at the time. When Kitty hit, Webb said he needed a girl singer and my brother said, 'Well, I got a little sister at home who can sing.' So Webb hired me, just like that."
Former Melody Ranch Girl Jean Shepard found it tougher to land a solo deal than Hill did. "Hank Thompson took an acetate of mine to [Capitol Records producer] Ken Nelson, and Ken told him, 'There's just no place for women in honky-tonk music.'" Nelson eventually signed Shepard to Capitol, for which her 1953 debut, "A Dear John Letter", a duet with Ferlin Husky, sold a million copies.
"Kitty and I, along with Skeeter Davis and others, we made the public realize that women could have a voice in this industry," Shepard says. "We weren't just girl singers in a band. We made the industry understand that sooner or later it was going to have to reckon with us. We were going be a force, come hell or high water."
Other women -- everyone from Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette to Dolly Parton and Connie Smith -- became forces in the industry in the '60s, a decade that saw Wells finally start to fade from the charts. But to varying degrees, Wells was the one they all sought to emulate. All of these women, as well as Hazel Dickens, Patty Loveless and Emmylou Harris, sang Wells' songs, while Lynn claimed for years in interviews that Kitty was her favorite singer.
Even more important than her music, though, was the way her career paved the way for subsequent generations of country women. And not just for women, as Social Distortion's bitchin' cover of "Makin' Believe" attests.
"Kitty did open doors," says Opry star Connie Smith. "I don't think she did it purposefully. She was just being Kitty Wells. It was just a natural thing for her to do. I believe that it was Kitty's calling to be a frontrunner, a pioneer, and that she obeyed that calling and that she did it in the finest sense that she could. She did it by staying true to herself -- as a mother, a wife, and an artist. I think that if anybody ever obeyed their calling, she did. And she continues to do so today."
Indeed, consider the circumstances surrounding not just the record Wells made for Capricorn in 1974, but those that led to its re-release 27 years later as well. In each case, she ventured somewhere she was reluctant to go, doing so only at the urging of family -- first her son-in-law, then her grandson. Not only that, but both of those moves -- recording with a bunch of Southern Rock musicians, and releasing a remixed album after she'd retired -- were equally as unlikely. As unlikely and unassuming, in many ways, as recording "Honky Tonk Angels" at the behest of her husband, and emerging as one of country music's great pioneers, back in 1952.
"I was just doing what I'd always done," says Wells, matter-of-factly as ever, of her breakthrough hit. "I was just singing for folks and trying to entertain them."
ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren lives and writes in Nashville, where, no matter what they say about Faith Hill, he knows that Ms. Kitty is and will always be the queen.
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