When it comes to being crowned the Queen of country music, Dolly Parton has some strong competition.
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Some women would prefer to wear a cowboy hat instead of a crown. When it comes to distinguishing who reigns supreme among these best country queens of the music business, it becomes a complicated process. They all have much in common, including the peculiar double consonants in their Christian names and all of them offer at least lip service and a sincere respect for traditional Christianity. They all made a bare minimum of one hundred thousand dollars a year after taxes, and three of them controlled business empires with assets in the millions. They have also all advocated the conventional joys of marriage (though some of them are not married to the same husbands they started out with), but it is clear to their public that they earned the most money in their connubial partnerships. One has a master's degree, another has gone to college, but the most successful of the six have never completed the eighth grade. Whatever their educational backgrounds, all not only sing, but wrote many of their hits as well. Each one has been called by reviewers and fans, "the undisputed queen of country music," and all of their fans and critics are telling the truth.
There were several more "undisputed queens" in the country music business at the time, but they didn't happen to have double consonants in their name or enjoy the fruits of vast real estate holdings. The world of country music can be likened to the British Isles before William the Conqueror came over from France to organize the English. There were numerous little kingdoms and a number of leaders calling themselves "kings." Some of these kings were more successful and powerful than others, and so it is among these country queens.
In 1974, the popular singer Carole King (how could she be a queen with a name like that?) sold more records than any other female performer. But stop any man or woman on the street in, say, East Orange, New Jersey, and ask, "What does the name 'Carole' mean to you?" Chances are the reply will be, "the late king of Rumania," or "something you sing at Christmastime." Stop a woman on the street in Dothan, Alabama, and ask what Dottie, Kitty, Donna, Tammy, Dolly, and Loretta mean and the answer-without hesitation and enunciated in clear, round (and generally reverent) tones-will be: "West, Wells, Fargo, Wynette, Parton, and Lynn." To say that these are household names to millions of American and Canadian women (and men-but their fans are considered to be predominately women) is a gross understatement. Country music is more than music–it is a lifestyle, and its fans are totally aware of the way their stars live. "I think of you as a member of my family," one fan wrote to Dolly Parton, "and that's why I thought you should know that my brother John's wife just gave birth to a baby boy.” When Donna Fargo was on her second tour a distraught man was ushered to her dressing room. He told Donna that a fire had engulfed their apartment killing one of his children, and his wife lay near death in the hospital. He begged Donna Fargo to visit his wife. She didn't know her child was dead, and he said, "Only you can tell her. You are the one she loves best in the world.”
Every one of country's queens had similar anecdotes to relate, yet none of them seemed truly aware of the power they had, the influence over others' lives. Dottie West's voice sold Coke on television. Coca-Cola, being a Georgia-based company, undoubtedly realized that myriad country fans knew the voice was not just a voice, but Dottie West's voice; Madison Avenue was slow to catch on to the country queens' selling power. They don't know that Dottie, Kitty, Donna, Tammy, Dolly, and Loretta bought and believed the American dream because it worked for them. And they worked for it, and didn’t give up what they had and have very easily. Women's liberation rhetoric was rarely part of their conversation, but they knew who they were and what they were about. They competed with men, on equal terms, despite that the words of their songs instructed women to accept their condition. D,K,D,T,D, and L were all consummate professionals. They drove hard bargains, cut deals that favored their end, and wouldn’t sing for less than top dollar.
Their reigns were fairly recent in the 70s, for until the mid 50s country music was a man's world. Then Kitty came along and raised the country fan's consciousness by letting one and all know that it wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels-men were to blame. The country queens didn't get there by inheriting titles. They never stopped working. Unlike other branches of music, the country fans insisted on seeing their favorites in person. A country star generally made over two hundred and fifty one-night stands a year, at country fairs, high school auditoriums, sports arenas, memorial coliseums, and neon-and-chrome honky-tonk clubs. Her time was spent traveling mostly by bus, living and eating on the run, hanging around dingy dressing rooms and depots, spending hours after each performance signing autographs, hugging fans and posing for photographs, thanking fans for the baskets of cold chicken wings and potato salad, and graciously refusing invitations by middle-aged couples to spend the night "in our bedroom. My husband and I would be proud to sleep on the couch."
Country fans, according to a once oft-repeated Nashville axiom, would have done anything for their royalty except leave them al one. It was probably a small price to pay for a $250,000 balance in a bank account, and it did leave the country queens about one hundred nights a year to spend with their princes (some traveled with their wives, others stayed home to mind the safe-deposit box) and their kids (which most queens had in an abundance). Well, how often did Prince Charles and Princess Anne see their mother?
Dottie West
At the time two middle-aged women, their streaked hair twirled high on the their heavily made-up heads, picked up the-then-latest Dottie West album from the rack at Ernest Tubb's record shop, right around the corner from where Grand Ole Opry was headquartered until 1973.
"Who’s the bearded young hippie lookin' at Dottie?" one of them asked.
"That's no hippie, Mabel darlin'," the other rep lied curtly. "It's Byron Allan."
"You mean that kid is Dottie's new husband? The one she married, both of them wearin' white jump suits or somethin' on that mountain in Sun Valley or somewhere?"
"The very one, honey."
"But he's so young," she said, wistfully. Her friend sighed. "Well, Dottie's worked hard and had a lot of trouble. She deserves whatever fun she gets. "
The word in Nashville was that it was a love match. "The look of love is no coincidence and no put-on,” an article on Dottie West stated. "She has turned to bearded Byron during many a performance and sung, 'Fuzzy-face, I love you.'” Whenever there was a newspaper piece about Dottie, the writer invariably commented on Dottie West's beauty. She was in her late thirties, and no longer wore crinolines or bright orange plastic jackets over block-checked pants. Her hair was reddish-blond instead of dark brown. She generally wore crushed-velvet suits, and in front of sophisticated audiences (her favorite recording artists those days included the non-country singer Helen Reddy, and Bread, a non-country rock group) she wore tight white hot pants under a slit skirt. Queen Dottie wasn’t afraid to be sexy.
She had regal confidence from the beginning. When she finished college (she was one of the few country queens with a college degree, and Tennessee Tech offered a Dottie West scholarship) she decided that her church-choir soprano voice should be heard by one and all. She announced the fact to Starday recording executives, arid they obeyed. Success came quickly. Her first marriage to Bill West ended in divorce, though some of her fans still asked, "Hey, Dottie, how's Bill?" It didn’t faze her. After all, she had an international reputation and huge crowds stood in the rain in the summer of 1973 in Wembley, England, and gave her four standing ovations when she sang her big hit, "Six Weeks Every Summer.”
Her big hit in America was for the Coca-Cola Company, which had Dottie (and all cola-drinking Americans) singing, "I was raised on country sunshine … and I'm happy with the simple things." Among them were an opulently furnished house, a garden that she tended to herself, immense show business success, and small businesses, including a company that manufactured Dottie West cut-out dolls. And, as far as getting into the mood for singing Coke commercials, Queen Dottie claimed "It's easy because the product is one the whole world knows. A few years ago I thought Big Orange was everything, but now things are different."
Kitty Wells
There is an old Carter Family tune called "I'm a-Goin' to Marry Kitty Wells." Johnny Wright met Muriel Deason in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Johnny was traveling with Jack Anglin, singing as "Johnny and Jack," and Muriel up and married Johnny and joined the team as a gospel singer. There weren't any female country singers around at the time, and Johnny thought she should have a new name. He chose Kitty Wells as her pseudonym, never thinking she would be the first queen of country music (and in the hearts of many of her older fans, the only queen. "I mean; just how many queens can a profession have?" someone once wrote). During the 50s, Kitty Wells emerged as the highest ranked female country singer and as a strong rival to male singers. She remained the only woman of the all-time top-ten country artists with the most hits on the charts. She ranked high among the top-ten artists with the most recorded sides, but Loretta Lynn had more number-one hits. That didn’t seem to bother Kitty at all. Kitty Wells, they said, was the artist who probably made the most money. And she recorded her hit, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels," which might have been the first women's lib country song (though Gloria Steinem probably didn’t know it). It was an angry answer to Hank Thompson's "Wild Side of Life," which claimed wicked, unfaithful women were a creation of God. Kitty disagreed and claimed, "It was men to blame." Obviously, the country fans agreed, because they immediately proclaimed their fealty. "She has neither pure pitch nor a good sense of rhythm, " a Nashville musicologist proclaimed, "but her nasal , straight from the Appalachians twang was the most distinctive female sound in the business, and it kept her such a big favorite in rural areas for so long that nobody could argue with her success." This was written when she was well over fifty, the mother of three children (one of them, Bobby, played a leading role in the "McHale's Navy" TV show). “I always took time to be a good mother," Kitty said. All of her children were married and had children of their own.
Originally, Kitty Wells was part of the Johnny and Jack show. But when Jack was killed in an auto accident (country music had a high death rate amongst its always-on-the-go performers), the name of the show was changed to the "Kitty Wells Show," and Johnny seemed to have happily fallen into the role of Prince Consort (though his own records had always done well). No queen spent more time among her subjects. She made almost three-hundred personal appearances a year, mostly one-nighters in places like Hatch, New Mexico, Rindge, New Hampshire, and Pagosa Springs, Colorado. "My record sales have been pretty good," she admitted. Her producers said they had been so "outstanding that no one knows the exact total, which runs into the many millions." When she was called a queen, Kitty told this story: Her bus stopped in a little Minnesota town and Kitty went into a grocery store. As she paid for her purchases she looked up and saw the bus pulling away. "You know it was an hour before I was missed on the bus and they came back.” Her husband Johnny said, "As far as I'm concerned, Kitty' II always be queen-of-'em-all."
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton is five foot two inches of bingles, bangles, and baubles. Her voice is overlaid with a rich, rural nuance and her songs are filled with off-color lyrics about stepping out with travelin ' men, shacking up with men from the wrong side of the tracks, and the downfall of wayward hippie girls. Dolly Parton was the shorter and more beautiful half of the Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton duo. In 1969 she "temporarily" replaced the enormously popular Norma Jean on Wagoner's syndicated TV show, but since then she became a major star in her own right, far outshining the multi-spangled Wagoner with her unforgettable appearance. (It's been said that her silhouette is not unlike that of South America.)
Although she looked like a sex symbol with her skin-tight dresses, towering stacks of blond hair, and layers of makeup and jewelry, Doily was quick to point out that she looked the way she did because as a child she was small, ugly, and had nothing nice to wear. Then, she could afford those things, she said. She wore them to please herself, even though she admitted it was a bit of a clutter. Dolly Parton was very determined to succeed as a musician. Beneath those towering locks was a mind that produced some of the most incisive lyrics in modern country music. Her music publishing company, Owepar, which her uncle managed, was extremely successful. She gave Wagoner half of it as a Christmas present, a gift worth thousands of dollars at the time. He gave her a Cadillac.
Unlike Tammy Wynette, Dolly's audience was predominantly male, and her husband was out of the limelight. His name was Carl Dean and he ran an asphalt business. Dolly met him the day she arrived in Nashville from the backwoods of Sevierville, Tennessee. Dolly doesn't claim to have been much of a cook; her business and songwriting left her little time for anything else. When she was on the road, she would sometimes stay up late writing songs, often dictating lyrics to a secretary. She says her husband realized how important her music was to her. "He knows I couldn't have been happy without my music, much as I love him," she once said. "As much as I was on the road, we made up for it when I was home. I really think it was good, or it had been in our marriage. To be away from each other a lot keeps you closer, if that makes any sense. You can enjoy more things and you don't have time to pick at every little fault with each other. "
Donna Fargo
The first Donna Fargo was a Mexican woman bullfighter whose name always appealed to former disk jockey and Los Angeles music promoter Stan Silver. When Stan fell in love with Lavonne Vonn, a North Carolina schoolteacher who was trying to make it as a singer in Southern California, he decided that Lavonne Silver still fell far short of Donna Fargo. Even though Nashville believed in the "Stand By Your Man" ethic, a lot of country-music people thought that Donna and Stan stood a little too close. Stan Silver was Donna's manager in the sense of career custodian. They had almost a partnership rather than a marriage, yet Donna claimed she was "The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A." and two million Americans were prepared to spend money to hear her testify to this.
After just one year in the music business, Donna Fargo was on her way to becoming a millionaire. She made no secret of her ambitions. "Ambition in Southern women is like sex," she said. “It’s something you think about, but you don't mention it aloud." Donna was not your average female country singer. She has a master's degree in education, and was about to head a program to instruct teachers in new educational methods when her first record hit the charts. "We were a real team," she said of her husband Stan. "We worked well together and were together all the time . . . I mean all the time; in most families husband and wife work at different jobs. But our life had been so busy that we hadn’t had time to think about anything. Even about finishing our house, or building one next door for the band to rehearse in. We were always on the go." Donna said she and her husband frequently talked about raising a family. Sometimes they wanted one, sometimes they didn’t. But at that moment she and her husband were concerned with getting better at their professions.
She wondered how it would turn out. The life on the road bothered her because she always felt wound up. They didn’t eat well, having to grab hot dogs or sandwiches or whatever they could, whenever they could. They did their best to take care of their health despite this. "People tell me they find religious overtones in my songs," Donna said. She doesn't know why. But she did go to a Methodist college in North Carolina, and admits that she's still a little guilty about having fun. "And my life was fun," said the Happiest Girl.
Tammy Wynette
The big news was almost “D-I-V-O-R-C-E" for Tammy Wynette, certainly the most controversial female country singer because of her famous song of nonliberation, "Stand By Your Man." She had stood by her man, husband George Jones, for more than five years before filing separation papers. He'd been hitting the bottle a little too hard, Tammy alleged, as the news rattled off America's wire services and set six thousand country-music disk jockeys' tongues a-clattering. Then, all of a sudden, they were back together again with a new chart busting single, "We're Gonna Hold On." And George and Tammy had a lot to hold on to, like their 340-acre farm complete with 15-room antebellum mansion just outside Nashville, their-then- $125,000 Silver Eagle bus, and their millions of dollars worth of potential record sales.
George Jones was a country-music superstar when Tammy Wynette was a seven-year-old in Tupelo, Mississippi. If he wasn't the "King of Country Music" in the 50s, he had earned at least a dukedom, and little Tammy collected his records. But there was no doubt in anybody's mind who was the star (and the main breadwinner) in the Joneses' household today. To many people, Tammy Wynette's pure voice was country music. When the producers of Five Easy Pieces wanted to epitomize country music in their film, they chose Tammy's recording of "Stand By Your Man.”
Tammy made it clear in several interviews that she believed the man should be the head of a household. "Country people aren't attracted to women's lib," she has said. "They like to be able to stand by their men. And of course men like the idea that their women are standing by them." Most of her communication on record was with women, generally between the ages of twenty-two and forty-five. A great many of her songs were about homes that were broken or were breaking. (She's been through two breakups herself.) In her shows she always emphasized, sometimes to the point of saturation, that she and George lived in a state of marital bliss. Tammy knew that, in the country-music business, women bought most of the records. "But 'Stand By Your Man' sold a million," she said. "I guess men bought it because they hoped their women would feel that way.”
Loretta Lynn
In a profession where "great" might have been the most misused word, people who use that term to describe Loretta Lynn usually mean it. She was probably the most publicized country-music star, and the most well-liked. Hers is a rags-to-riches story to top all others. Loretta grew up in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, was married at thirteen, had four children by the time she was eighteen, and was a grandmother at twenty-eight. Loretta Lynn was on the hit charts more consistently than any other female country singer. When she was not in the recording studio, she was usually on the road singing at one of the many two-thousand-capacity halls on the country circuit. She worked an incredible number of dates, and still found time to manage a business empire that included western-wear stores, the-then-largest private rodeo in the world, and a music publishing company. She owned a whole town in Tennessee and a hacienda in Mexico.
When Loretta sang, she had excellent control over words, filling each song to the bursting point with warmth and sensuality. In her risque duets with Conway Twitty, she was the master (or rather mistress) of the double entendre. Yet she couldn’t read well enough to pass the written test for a driving license. She was, in other words, a natural, and this naturalness allowed her to revert at any time to being the quintessential country girl whose basic simplicity was the cornerstone of her appeal to her legion of fans. Loretta has firm views on women's lib and the relationship between men and women. Although she is an extremely capable business woman, she believes a man should definitely be the head of the house. She thinks a woman should get the same pay as a man for doing a man's job, but she doesn't necessarily believe that women should be in the factory. "They should raise the man's pay and take the women out." She regrets that many kids today aren't getting married. "They just go off and live together and sometimes with more than one man ... but I think this is just a phase we're gain' through now. Men and women will always live together and stay together and that's the way it should be.”
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