ISSUE #27: Why Tammy Wynette Matters, With Steacy Easton

The iconic singer has long since receded into the shadows of her more approachable peers — Easton helped us understand why.

Surprise! Our next Don’t Rock The Inbox Live! is on deck for next week: VINCENT NEIL EMERSON will be joining the DRTI official Zoom room on Thursday, October 26th at 6 p.m. CT to talk new music, growing up Indigenous in Texas and (I hope) Reservation Dogs (best show on TV by a significant margin) — become a paying subscriber today so you don’t miss it!

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We launched the Don’t Rock The Inbox Book Club about a month ago with a doozy: Why Tammy Wynette Matters by Steacy Easton. I know at least for me, reading Steacy’s work was both massively educational and almost comforting — a kind of reassurance that I wasn’t crazy for wanting to explore country history without projecting any kind of dogma onto it. Easton gives a nuanced, thoughtful, and unconventional read on one of the trickier country characters, zooming in and out between details of Wynette’s life and the broader impact of her work and art without shying away from the more upsetting aspects of her biography. Our conversation was great, with awesome contributions from readers like you as well as friend of the newsletter David Cantwell. Read on for some edited excerpts from that conversation.

***If you are a paying subscriber, don’t forget that you can listen to the complete conversation (which includes…more than a little shit-talking) in podcast form here.***

Natalie: I know you write about it a little bit in the book, but what made you want to write about Tammy Wynette?

Steacy: The first reason is, most obviously, that I love her music — that her music's always been significant to me emotionally. It's also just really important in terms of the culture. Second is that culturally, she's getting a bit of a short shrift of late, and she's become a bit of an underdog compared to Loretta and especially Dolly. I've always been a little bit interested in rescue missions. The third is that a lot of my country music writing is about gender and sexuality, and authorship and performative gender especially and Tammy's really important in that conversation.

Natalie: I just want to draw out one line I really loved from the intro to your book.

Admitting that one does not know, that one cannot know, or that a life is too complex to be fully understood does not preclude our attempts at knowing, nor does it lessen the potential for tremendous gains from what we may learn.

I thought it was so refreshing that you were embracing ambiguity and sort of being like, “I can take this seriously and do a lot of research without needing to like to offer a resolution or a specific narrative.” A lot of times in any kind of writing, but especially in music writing, we just can't know so many of the details — we will never, ever know the capital-T Truth, whatever that means.

Steacy: And country's really interesting in that way, because country always assumes an intimacy with audience. Especially women who are singing country music to female audiences, you automatically think that you know what's going on with any set of circumstances. One of the reasons why I wanted to make that ambivalence explicit was to split persona from person, too.

Marissa: You could be writing about current country music culture, like as of yesterday. The popular thing right now seems to be to refer to country music along this fault line, that there's like one side that's one way, and there's one side that's the other way, and you have to be either one of them. I struggle with that, especially with figures like Tammy and Loretta. But I don't want to be in either camp, because they're very complicated and can be contradictory at times. So it's timely and refreshing to explore that middle space without having to feel like you're deciding where you land on one person.

Steacy: I've always been suspicious of purity.

Natalie: That ties to one of the things that I thought was really useful in the book, and that I feel like I don't see that much in music books — the way that you actually compared her to Loretta Lynn and to Dolly Parton. I feel like usually when a book is about an artist, people are kind of resistant to talking about their peers. But the comparison is so illuminating: that distinction between Loretta and Dolly being such buttoned-up public figures, having such polish and clear sense of self where Tammy Wynette…didn't necessarily. Was that something you were always planning to include?

Steacy: I don't think you could have done it without that. She had a lifelong friendship with them. Like there's that incredible story about when she was in the hospital, and she asked Dolly to do her makeup. Of course we have a tendency to pit women against each other, especially women performers. One of the things I love about country music is that I find it essentially a collective medium — I don't think you can tell a country music story without trying to think about it as a collective whole. This may be a controversial opinion, but I think that country is less committed to the idea of a single male genius. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

Natalie: No, I think that's true. I feel like it's a lot more about a sort of performed humbleness and serving the audience?

Marissa: They're like committed to the idea not of a single male genius, but like several okay-ish men. For all of the negative effects of that community, that community does exist not without benefit or impact to the genre and the music that it makes. The country music is a family thing is real, and it's essential to acknowledge in its fullness to accurately talk about the music.

Reader Shane: There was one part where you were talking specifically about the song "Womanhood" — Bobby Braddock, who wrote it, talked about how it was about a religious girl losing her virginity and the conflict there. But you talked about how there's more beyond that based on what you see with the performance of Tammy Wynette in her life and in her work. I was just curious if you could kind of expound a little bit about the songwriter's intention versus what the song becomes through the performance based on your understanding of gender performance and sexuality and stuff like that.

Steacy: Tammy, I think, was on husband number three at this point. Even when she wasn't on her husband number three, her voice has always had this sort of profound adult quality — it's always had this urge and this yearning and this hunger and this sort of ambivalence about her life as a mother and as a wife. I feel like she sings it with this sexual desire or sexual hunger that is sometimes rare in country.

As somebody who believes profoundly that gender is performative and that gender is a set of constructions, and as somebody who's trans and non-binary and very queer, you kind of search for what you can find in some spaces. I love that hunger, but I also love that phrase of "putting on your womanhood." I'm sure the Tammy was not thinking of like Judith Butler. But it's like, I think the audience takes what the audience wants from a text. There's a bunch of stuff that was ambivalent in that song that was really interesting and it was better performed than written. But when I first heard it, it was just audacious. That sentiment was audacious. You take that audacity, and you build shelter in it, which is I think what queer audiences have been doing for decades.

Natalie: When you were doing the “Stand By Your Man” — probably kind of the centerpiece in a lot of ways — was there anything that you came across while you were writing that that surprised you?

Steacy: I was surprised at how much I hated Lyle Lovett’s cover [laughs]. No, but that she did a whole spectacle at a plantation estate for George Wallace — and that she rewrote the song for him…I knew she went all in for Wallace, but there’s a difference between going all in and doing that. It was a central chapter and it was my sample chapter, but I liked it less or it became less important to me than “Apartment No. 9,” “You’re Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” or even “Womanhood” in terms of a personal canon. I thought “Stand By Your Man” would be higher on my personal canon. David Cantwell has written really beautifully about it, if I can call him out.

Marissa: Kassi Ashton did this performance of that song really early in her career, and she sort of stopped in the middle to be like — I can't remember exactly what she says, I think it's like, "I'm sorry, Tammy, I don't play that way" or something — but performs the whole song. It's really interesting, I gotta find it.

David Cantwell: I wouldn't want to call "Stand By Your Man" feminist, but, as Stacey and I have talked about before and I've written about some, it's as proto-feminist as a lot of Loretta songs are in many ways.

That opening line, "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman giving all your love to just one man," which is a pretty unprecedented declaration of female desire outside of marriage even if she doesn't actually act upon it. That's the starting point for the song! The highest note in the song, "Keep giving all the love you can" — you have to reach for that note. I don't know if that's deliberate, but it certainly comes through in the performance that she's emphasizing the conditional. That's just massive, I think, in terms of understanding that song.

Natalie: I'm gonna use this opportunity to complain one more time — hopefully the last time. I just saw a critic at a major publication who shall remain nameless call Olivia Rodrigo's album (which I don't care about) "too good." Like, she's "being an A+ student" or something. I was like, "Okay, I'm triggered."

Because every successful woman is too something, right? This goes back forever. Even people like Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, who so carefully managed their public personas to try and walk that middle line and not step on any toes (or at least be strategic in how they stepped on them), were still "too" something to people. So Tammy Wynette, who is obviously somewhat chaotic as you show in your book, is inevitably going to not be given any respect or generosity whatsoever.

It did kind of make me think of — this is a comparison that I think works in some ways, but definitely not in others — but of Billie Holiday, because she is so often represented still as just a tragic figure, a victim of circumstance. She generally gets more respect than Tammy Wynette because she is broadly and correctly understood to be a genius in 2023, but her story is still too often reduced to the worst things that happened to her. It's awful.

Steacy: We don't use the language for male chaos that we do for female chaos, and we're more apologetic of male chaos and we are of female chaos. We can talk about the dysfunctionality of Jones and Wynette, and it was a profoundly dysfunctional marriage, but Jones abused Wynette in ways that are fundamentally different than just having a messy relationship. Most likely Jones hit her, most likely Jones said terrible things, definitely Jones chased her around the bedroom with a gun. How we think about mess is really important; how we think about chaos. I don't want to let Tammy off the hook, but Jones seemed capable killing Wynette, and Wynette seemed mostly just capable of killing herself, which I think is a huge difference.

Paying subscribers, listen to the full conversation below: