How Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance.
Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits..
Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius.
Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette\'s performance of Apartment #9--and it\'s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written.
Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician\'s license.
Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about--fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness.
Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette\'s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art.
But there were other sides to the first lady of country.
With hits such as Stand By Your Man and Golden Ring, Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity.
How Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance
