THE READING ROOM: ‘Why Tammy Wynette Matters’ Considers Her Life Hand-in-Hand With Her Work

Tammy Wynette sang some of the saddest songs in country music: “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Apartment No. 9,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House.” Wynette’s vocals waver on the edge of breaking as they wring deep emotions from listeners. When Wynette modulates her vocal in the second line of the final chorus of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” and reaches the song’s highest note on “becomes final today,” you hear her heart being torn out, but at the same time you hear defiance and determination. It’s a hurting song, a song that also uncovers the ambivalence of staying in a marriage just to put on a show. Many of Wynette’s songs trade on this ambivalence, with the singer performing the feminine role in domestic drama and standing by that image even though there might be cracks in it. In spite of Wynette’s many number-one hits, her voice seldom graces country radio these days.

In their brilliant new book, music writer Steacy Easton takes on the question of Why Tammy Wynette Matters. The beauty of Easton’s book lies in its look beyond the superficial biographies of Wynette that seldom probe her abusive marriages, beyond a page or two, or look into why and how Wynette chose her songs and created the persona she did in her performances of the songs. Easton opens their book by making two arguments about Wynette’s life and work: “The first is that Wynette was one of the greatest creators and singers of country music of the twentieth century. The second is that Wynette made her life into her work and that this transformation was itself art.” In relatively short, dense, and rich chapters, Easton explores facets of Wynette’s transformation of the life into the work, providing carefully detailed readings of her songs.

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Wynette’s story knows she led a difficult life. When she was 17 she married construction worker Euple Byrd, but she eventually left him to move to Nashville. She married four more times — including, of course, to George Jones—each marriage almost more abusive than the previous one. In addition, she endured harassment, stalking, and a 1978 kidnapping that is still unsolved. “Wynette made art out of a difficult life,” Easton writes, “but her music is genius even if a listener knows nothing about her biography.”

One of the themes to understanding how Wynette performs her life is domesticity. In a stunning reading of Wynette’s classic “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” Easton demonstrates that “this whole song is tightly articulated and spare. Wynette’s performance leans into the self-aware kitsch but weaponizes it, making the domestic an aesthetic and political problem; she takes the story, what she claims she overheard a child say, and repeats it in the tone of broken adult womanhood … The song never quite lands as a slice of life but instead as a well-articulated allegory, a country song about country singing.”

Easton reflects further on how this song illustrates why Wynette’s music continues to be relevant. “Wynette made work about people being at home, and especially about women at home, and this apparently hit home in the 1960s. She was rarely at home … The dramatic irony of making great art about domestic roles while failing in them is central to understanding why she matters.”

Regarding the theme of domesticity and Wynette, Easton concludes: “Wynette’s best songs are dense tales of heartbreak, little morality plays that exist within the four-minute-or-less idea of the song itself. Wynette crafted the stories she told about her personal life by using the domestic lives she led as fodder for the songs.”

Wynette lived her life in pain, so much so that Reba McEntire even described the pain of her own difficult 2019 divorce in a song titled “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain.” Easton provides a litany of the pains Wynette endured, including “the originating pain of all that absent or ambivalent parenting she experienced; the depression that might have been clinical but might have been something else entirely … the pain of failed marriages; the pain of being abused by bad husbands.” Wynette embodies these pains in her songs, and for her the boundaries between the personal and professional are porous. “A Tammy Wynette kind of pain is a kind of country singing, a genre note — it’s not only the subject matter but how she sang about that subject matter,” Easton writes. “Wynette’s best work (‘Apartment No. 9,’ ‘Stand By Your Man,’ ‘DIVORCE,’ ‘Womanhood’) has her appearing at first tenuously, then her voice breaks, then the whole thing collapses and her voice pours forward like water from a damn being breached.”

In the end, Wynette matters because of the “depth of her art, the formal qualities of her singing, and her ability to make melodramatic genius out of her life … One of the reasons Wynette matters is the general ambivalence of her life, and how that ambivalence inspired a career that included ambitious, transparent, and haunted work, work that should be taken seriously.”

Why Tammy Wynette Matters is a tour-de-force work of critical genius, and Easton’s book prompts us to listen once again to Wynette and to hear her performances in fresh ways. Their book is revelatory, offering insightful and illuminating readings of the ways that Wynette’s life and work intersect.

Steacy Easton’s Why Tammy Wynette Matters was published in May by University of Texas Press.