Kitty Wells started her career as a “girl singer” in the 1940s and ended it as the “Queen of Country Music,” a mantle she assumed in the early 1950s and wore until her passing at the age of 92. On this day in 1952, her rendition of the song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” became the first chart-topping hit by a woman in country-music history. Her commercial success proved that female country music artists could sell records, make albums, headline concerts and match every success of their male counterparts. While commonplace today, this was nothing short of a revolution in the 1950s, when “girl singers” were meant to be seen, and heard just a little. When she cut the song, Wells was a featured singer in her husband’s group, Johnnie & Jack and the Tennessee Mountain Boys. She was 33, had three children and little success with her own records though she was a popular element of the group show. On the verge of retirement, she’d only agreed to record “Honky Tonk Angels” for the $125 session fee. The song’s emergence as a proto-feminist statement was largely accidental. Written by a man, JD Miller, it was intended as an answer to the hit “Wild Side of Life” by Hank Thompson. Kitty’s reply managed to convey a feminine weariness about being underestimated and a thinly veiled anger at being blamed for domestic strife. “I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels,” Thompson sung. “I might have known you’d never make a wife/You gave up the only one that ever loved you/And went back to the wild side of life.” “It wasn’t God who made Honky Tonk angels,” Kitty shot back. “As you said in the words of your song/Too many times married men think they’re still single/That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.” While this seems lyrically innocuous today, the song was deemed “suggestive” and banned by the country radio institution The Grand Ole Opry. But both female and male fans cottoned to her response, and her voice, and the song shot up the charts becoming one of the few answer songs to eclipse the one it was replying to.
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 10:44:02 +0000
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