The first Queen of Country Music passed away at the age of 92 earlier this week.
As it happens I posted Kitty's "Making Believe" just a few months ago, together with Emmylou Harris's version of the same song:
There was nothing showbiz about Kitty Wells. You could say she lacked charisma. She had that Country thing of just being an ordinary-looking woman who happened to play guitar and sing pretty well, following the template of Mother Maybelle Carter. The glamour came later, with singers like Patsy Cline.
Here's the 1952 song that made her famous, and marked the point where Country women finally stepped out of the shadows and started asserting themselves. It was written as a riposte to Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life", where, as was usual in them days, it was loose women - "honky tonk angels" - who took the blame for leading good men astray. Or, as the song has it, "I didn't know God made honky tonk angels". Kitty was having none of it:
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