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.
