Country queen Tammy Wynette kept renewing her beautician's licence just in case
Tammy Wynette sold an estimated 30 million records and put twenty singles at the top of the US country chart. Yet every year until she died she renewed her cosmetology licence, in case she ever needed to go back to doing hair for a living.
She was born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942 on a farm near the Mississippi and Alabama line. Her father, a guitarist and singer, died of a brain tumour when she was nine months old, but not before sitting her at the piano and insisting she learn. Raised largely by her grandparents, she picked cotton and hated every minute of it, played piano by ear so well that a teacher said lessons were a waste of money, and made the all-state basketball team twice.
Married at 17, she lived for a while in an 1844 house with no running water, heat or electricity, nailing cardboard boxes to the walls against the winter wind. She trained as a beautician, sang for tips as a barmaid in Memphis, and in Birmingham appeared on an early-morning television show, filmed from the waist up to hide her pregnancy, before heading to work at a salon for 45 dollars a week.
In January 1966 she drove to Nashville with her three children and everything they owned in the car. Several labels turned her down before the Epic producer Billy Sherrill signed her and renamed her, telling her she looked like a Tammy, after the film Tammy and the Bachelor. Her debut, Apartment No. 9, only reached number 44, and promoters were reluctant to book a woman, but hits such as D-I-V-O-R-C-E and her own Stand by Your Man soon followed. That song drew praise and criticism alike for its picture of wifely loyalty.
Her stormy marriage to fellow star George Jones, from 1969 to 1975, produced chart-topping duets. She later married George Richey in 1978. Intestinal illnesses brought repeated hospital stays and a dependence on prescription painkillers, reportedly the cause of her death at 55 in 1998. She was among the first women in country to earn gold and platinum records and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Source: Tammy Wynette
