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.”
