Why Tammy Wynette matters
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

"Tammy Wynette is literally referred to as "the first lady of country music," which speaks both to her importance in the genre as well as the way she has been partially defined by her marriage to singer George Jones. She had 20 number-one hits, the best-known being "Stand By Your Man." Steacy Easton believes Wynette was a complicated figure whose work plays with themes of domesticity, high femme armor, soft politics, pain, melodrama, sex, fame, tradition, and camp. Each of those themes gets a chapter in this book. In some cases--soft politics--the theme is explored primarily through a song ("Stand By Your Man," which she performed in support of segregationist George Wallace). In others--high femme armor--they work off her biography (the fact that Wynette was especially close to her team of stylists and never gave up her cosmetician's license). Often, Easton is working with both; this book argues not only that Wynette was one of the greatest voices in the history of country music but that she "made her life into her work, and this transformation itself was art." In a sense, Easton argues, she mythologized her own life, interpreting it as she would a song. A conclusion meditates on how the author is, in many ways, an outsider to Wynette's work and yet it still stirs them and provokes unanswerable questions that only make her more worthy of the serious consideration she has rarely received. They write, "As a trans person, I don't want to give Wynette over to the transphobes and the homophobes, because I think that mutually trying to understand cultural signs allow for a larger and more complex political reading.""--,Provided by publisher.