by Bruce Feiler
Within minutes, a member of “The Tonight Show” staff appeared at the door to conduct his preshow interview. He carried a notepad and several press clippings. He was fishing for charming stories. “There was a cute story you told in People about Arch proposing to you…” he said. Wynonna wasn’t pleased. “Fans like to hear stories of Arch getting down on his knees,” she said, “but I think Arch is tired of hearing it.” “What about a story from your wedding…?” Wynonna rejected that as well. “I’ve got it,” he said. “How about we talk about your mother…?” “No, I’ve got it,” she said, standing up to go to rehearsal. “How about we talk about my music.”
Music is always what Wynonna did best and what the Judds did better than most. At the time the Judds debuted in the mid-1980s, women still played second fiddle to men. This had been the case since the dawn of hillbilly music and reflected the gender traditions of the Old South. Men went out—worked, drank, and fooled around (the fiddle was called the “devil’s box” because of its association with drinking and dancing), while women stayed home. As Bob Oermann and Mary Bufwack wrote in their study of women in American music, country music “stands nearly alone as a record of the thoughts and feelings, the fantasies and experiences of this invisible and often silent group of women.” The female entertainers who did perform in public tended to be in families, like the Carter Family—A.P., his wife Sara, and her sister Maybelle. Though A.P. dominated the group, the women created the musical legacy. Maybelle’s revolutionary guitar style helped transform the instrument from background rhythm to dominant sound. Through songs like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Keep on the Sunny Side” the Carter Family created a folk tradition that would reach its apogee with the Mandrells and the Judds. (Another legacy of the Carters fully realized with the Judds was rewriting family history. Though Sara separated from A. P. Carter in 1933 and divorced him six years later, Victor executives asked Sara to conceal her feelings so the public would still believe they were a family.)
Female artists finally started shining following World War II. Whereas much of prewar country music had been drawn from Victorian culture—courting, praising God, mourning dead children—the genre now expanded to include more taboo subjects, like infidelity, drinking, and divorce. The two women who defined that change were Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline. Cline, born just across the mountains from Naomi, was a pop country chanteuse with lamé dresses, fur shawls, and a lusty, hard-living lifestyle. Wells, a native of Nashville, was privately a demure wife and mother, though publicly she sang of guilt, illicit romance, and broken dreams. Her breakthrough song, written by a man, was an answer song to Hank Thompson called “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels:” “Too many times married men think they’re still single / That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.” It was Wells, with her gingham dresses, who paved the way for traditional artists like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Cline, more seductive, spawned a crossover legacy that ran through Crystal Gayle and, once she left her mother, Wynonna.
The Judds belonged to a different, folksier tradition. Their debut album came out at a time when Nashville was beginning to rekindle its traditional roots. Going back to Joan Baez and Judy Collins in the sixties, as well as Emmylou Harris in the seventies, acoustic music had a rich if uncommercial legacy on Music Row. In the eighties, a new breed of windswept women began to take hold: Kathy Mattea, Nanci Griffith, and Suzy Bogguss. Naomi’s back-to-roots plan, in other words, had proved prescient. To drive home their retro theme, the Judds’ first single was “Had a Dream (for the Heart),” an Elvis cover. The song reached only the twenties, but sufficiently set up their next two singles, both of which reached number one. “Why Not Me,” written by Maher, Sonny Throckmorton, and Harlan Howard, is a resounding call to basics perfectly suited to the country’s “It’s Morning in America” attitude. The song was named Single of the Year by the Country Music Association. It was followed by “Mama He’s Crazy,” a vulnerable statement of first love, led by a voice that, as Oermann and Bufwack noted, could “trumpet, coo, shout, sigh, moan, growl, and sass.” The song won a Grammy for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group.
Over the next six years, the Judds released a total of six albums, each filled with plain-spoken pleas, “Grandpa (Tell Me ’Bout the Good Old Days),” and spunky declarations, “Girls Night Out.” They also had Naomi, who was charming onstage and funny on television (“Well, slap the dog and spit in the fire!” she said after winning the Horizon Award). “Reviewers reviewed more than our music,” Naomi said. “Because of my size-six figure-flattering dresses, I was called a ‘Barbie Doll.’ They’d compare Wy with Elvis because of her black pants, rhinestoned rock ‘n’ roll jackets, and matching boots.” To most Americans, their roles were even more familiar. Wynonna was the randy, troubled teen who sneaks under the bleachers at the football game to cop a cigarette and a grope with her boyfriend (one early boyfriend had been Dwight Yoakam). Naomi, meanwhile, was the small-town teacher who wears hotpants and a little too much makeup and whom everyone suspects has been sleeping with the captain of the football team and teaching him about the real world. “The neurotic, dramatic Naomi Judd of life,” Wynonna called her mother, the “Queen of Everything.” Naomi called her daughter, the “Princess of Quite a Lot.” The titles seemed fitting. If Garth hoped to be a superhero, John Wayne saving the world, Naomi wanted to be the “Queen of Nashville,” meddling, prying, and ruling over all. Wynonna, by contrast, wanted only to be a princess. She had no intention of lifting a finger.
Inevitably, though, she had to. Fairy tales have a way of working themselves out: the mother must die; the hero must face the final challenge alone. Just ask Bambi. Few in Nashville, in fact, were surprised by this turn of events. As Woody Bowles told me, the Judds had always been listed with Wynonna’s name first, because many around them anticipated that Wynonna would someday become a solo act. By the late eighties, that expectation had become so commonplace that a consensus had emerged in Nashville that Wynonna would benefit from separating from her mother. Even Naomi began to notice it. “I remember settling down in my hotel room to read the new copy of Country Music magazine,” she wrote. “Our writer friend Bob Allen interviewed us separately for an article titled ‘Two Down-Home Gals Ease into their Cinderella Slippers.’ Wy’s words prompted Bob to point out a fact perhaps obvious to everyone but me. His psychological assessment was that despite her immense talent, she often displays the gum-smacking impulsiveness of a child. Wy seemed to rail against my quiet domination, but always sought my approval.” The two would have to “cut that psychological umbilical cord that was still attached.” Soon enough, they got their chance.
In 1986, Naomi, now forty and still cultivating the idea that she and Wynonna looked like sisters, suffered a severe allergic reaction to an injection of collagen—ten shots in each of her cheeks. Her face ballooned, she wrote, and her strength weakened. By 1987, still tired and often unable to perform, she was diagnosed with mono. Three years later, unable to get out of bed at all, she was diagnosed, she says, with hepatitis. “You tested negative for both A and B,” one of her doctors told her. “There’s now a test to identify type C, and I’ll get you one. You can’t have D because you must have B before you can get type D, and your symptoms don’t match type E.” Naomi says her doctors never determined the real nature of her illness (she thinks it may have come from the collagen), but that it was chronic. Within weeks, she had decided to quit.
On October 17, 1990, in the same building where the Judds had their audition, Naomi Judd, surrounded by her new husband Larry Strickland and Wynonna, announced that she would be retiring after a year-long farewell tour. “All these men were there,” Hazel Smith told me, “and they were so busy crying they didn’t bother to ask any questions. Finally I had to raise my hand and ask, ‘What was the problem? Why didn’t she have any symptoms?’” Wynonna didn’t care; she wanted to die. “I remember the tears just streaming down my face,” she told me. “The first thing I said was: ‘T
hen I quit too.’”
Naomi, though, would not let her quit. “I’ve always believed that I appreciated our career more than you,” Naomi told her, “but the reality is you need it more than me. You need to sing like you need to breathe. I’ve crawled over broken glass to get us here, so don’t you dare think for one instant you’re going to throw it all away, young lady! You’re gonna carry on the family business.” But the real question, as it turned out, was whether Wynonna could ever carry on a business her mother had so controlled. In one of the more passionate sections of her book, Naomi wrote that one of the most liberating realizations in her life was that “Every successful person in a codependent relationship is still a failure!” How prophetic those words would seem when applied to the life of her daughter, who was about to go out on her own in a gesture she believed—and that everyone hoped—would finally set her free.
Downstairs in the studio, a stand-up comedian was warming up the audience. It was a few minutes before five now, and the audience members had just been let into their seats. They were squirming, snapping pictures, and hurriedly changing their Disneyland T-shirts for ones with the names of their hometowns: SPRINGFIELD TIGERS. HEAR US ROAR!!
“Now we have to make a decision,” announced the comedian. For five minutes, he had been telling DJ-caliber jokes and pimping for applause by handing out free Frisbees. “Either we all stand or we all sit. It’s totally up to you. But let me tell you, you have a better chance of getting on TV if you all stand.”
The audience screamed, “Stand!!!” The comedian winked at the director.
“Okay,” he said when the roaring subsided, “when Jay walks out from behind that wall, we all stand. But make it look real. Make it look American. Leaping to your feet is a good thing.”
A few minutes after the theme music, Jay Leno finally appeared, bobbing and nodding in his small-town councilman way and weaving gracefully through a series of jokes. The audience laughed appreciably, helped by an occasional rim shot. The room itself was surprisingly cramped, about the size of a high school gymnasium. On second glance, I realized the studio was painted to look like a replica of Fenway Park in Boston, near Jay’s hometown. His monologue spot was home plate. Behind the audience the walls were painted green, with yellow foul lines. And where the pitcher’s mound would be, a camera stared him in the face.
Near the end of the show, Wynonna appeared. She looked heavy in her five-months pregnant state, but the camera stayed focused on her face, which was tranquil. She closed her eyes when she sang and swayed back and forth to the chant, “My Angel Is Here.” These moments, as I was learning, were her only moments of peace. The audience was grateful. They stood without instruction.
When it was over, she walked the few steps to the desk and greeted Jay Leno with a kiss. She had only a few seconds of “couch time,” as it’s known. Few singers, though, are even invited to sit. It was a mark of her celebrity status. “Congratulations,” Jay said when he sat down, “on your marriage and the baby!” Wynonna smiled. Jay was running out of time. The stage manager gave him the signal to wind down. “But I have to ask you this,” he said, leaning over, touching her velvet arm, and adopting his most sympathetic expression. “How is your mother?”
EIGHT
THE LEGENDS
Waylon Jennings was feeling crotchety. On a cold winter night, twenty years after he walked into a Nashville studio, waved a Buntline Special .22 Magnum Revolver, and threatened to shoot anyone who played his instrument without feeling, Waylon was returning to a nearby studio with his pal Willie Nelson to reprise their epochal Outlaw success. The Outlaws were an informal mix of drug addicts and renegades (Waylon, Willie, Tompall Glaser, Kinky Friedman, Kris Kristofferson) who shook up Nashville in the sixties and seventies and yanked Music Row into the Age of Hippies. They overturned convention, grew gangly beards, demanded exalted royalty rates, and ultimately achieved such breakthrough success (Wanted! The Outlaws, released in 1976, was country’s first certified million-copy seller) that Nashville had no choice but to hold its nose and accede to their every demand.
The Outlaws also spawned a generation of followers who tried to mimic their raw, individualistic style. “The more I thought about it over the past couple of years,” Wade once told me, “and the more I listen to myself sing, the more I realized, ‘I’m trying to sing like Waylon.’ I always have. My whole life. It’s the way his voice sounds, the way he sings: deep, wailing—hell, his name is Waylon.”
As great as the Outlaws’ influence was, however, and as legendary as they had become (Willie had even been invited to join the Country Music Hall of Fame), the Outlaws were also in a bind, a dilemma shared by most of Nashville’s past masters: Having laid the foundation of country’s success, how should they share in its current boom? Younger stars might pay them deference (“Waylon is the reason I’m here,” Wade said flatly), but those newer artists also expected their time in the spotlight. For onetime revolutionaries Willie and Waylon, who on this night were being asked to update their signature album for RCA, the predicament was particularly acute: Should they step aside in deference to the young, as they once asked their elders to do, or should they rejoin the battles of their youth?
Waylon was the first to arrive, strolling through the glass doors of the Room and Board Studio, across the corner from Reba’s new multimillion-dollar palace. He was not feeling well. His diabetes had been acting up lately, furthering dimming his vision and adding a little more shuffle to his step. Though just shy of sixty (and off drugs for a decade now), he looked weathered in a sort of Mount Rushmore way. His dark eyebrows—occasionally arched, often furrowed—were still the most noticeable feature on his face. His semibeard was formidable, a goatee with wings. He looked like a small-town Texas undertaker.
Willie arrived next. He seemed gnomelike in his AMERICAN PROFESSIONAL BULLFIGHTING road jacket, black sweatpants, and New Balance jogging shoes. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. His beard was a majestic white, a sharp contrast to his blotched red nose and grayish brown pigtails, which hung, Pippi Longstocking-like, around his shoulders. A small entourage followed him into the already crowded foyer. His usual retinue included several young women in tight-fitting dresses who looked as though they could have handed out Academy Awards and a few songwriters hovering in a marijuana haze who appeared as if they were waiting for Willie to turn, clasp his hands together, and utter a Yoda-caliber musing that would send them into orbits of imagination and insight.
The two old friends greeted each other warmly, then turned to speak to the huddled mass of hangers-on, publicists, record executives, film crews, plus a few odd celebrities like singer Kim Carnes, songwriter Dan Penn, and writer Chet Flippo, formerly of Rolling Stone, whose breakthrough reporting helped launched the Outlaws into the counterculture pantheon. Altogether the attention, coupled with the trays of bright orange cheese and platters of pink salmon, was oddly reverential for these paragons of iconoclasm. Their grumpiness, though, always the source of their charisma, was never far away. When my turn came to shake Waylon’s hand, I was struck by the convention of his slick jogging suit with three racing stripes down the side, his bronze eagle-shaped logo around his neck, and his black WAYLON baseball cap. His shoes, too, seemed to be part of the ensemble.
“So where did you get those shoes?” I asked of his black, Italian-looking hightops.
“I bought them in Seattle,” he said. His voice had the scratchy whine of a recording coming through twenty-year-old speakers. “They were being discontinued. John Cash tried to get him a pair, but they don’t make ’em anymore.”
“Is this outfit part of your line, too?” I asked.
“Shit, you’ve got to be kidding,” he grumbled. He took a step back and glared at me. “What the hell kind of question is that? What’s that crap you got on?” I was wearing blue jeans and a purple turtleneck. “Is that your line? Don’t you know who I am? Loose and easy is my style.” And then, speaking to one of the many attendants crowded around him: “Do y
ou have a gun? I’m afraid I’m going to have shoot this man for asking such a stupid question.”
He turned to enter the studio.
Once in the studio, Waylon and Willie crowded in front of free-standing mikes as the half dozen musicians prepared to lay the tracks. The song, which would later be added to the eleven original cuts and nine “lost” tracks to make the commemorative package, was the dusty West Texas ode “Nowhere Road,” written by Steve Earle and Reno Kling. Earle, at Waylon’s suggestion, was also serving as producer. It seemed like an inspired choice. Steve Earle, like his patron, was a troubled prodigy (his 1986 album Guitar Town is widely considered to have launched the contemporary country-rock movement in Nashville) who had been in and out of prison, as well as on and off heroin, in a commercially stunted but critically exalted career as a modern-day Outlaw. Recently released from incarceration, he was making something of a comeback in Nashville. Though his black hair flopped uncontrollably over his forehead and his sideburns were as bushy as ever, he had less of the wild bear appearance that had marked his earlier years. He was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a FEAR NO EVIL tattoo visible on his arm.
