Kitty Wells and Country Music's Feminism

Kitty Wells, heralded the "Queen of Country Music," died earlier this week from complications from a stroke. She was 92.

Music's royalty ranking is kind of silly, but in Wells's case, it's pretty accurate: she scored the first number one country hit recorded by a woman with J.D. Miller's song, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," written in response to Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side Of Life." Says Nathan Rabin from The A.V. Club:

“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” epitomized what made Wells such a fascinating and fascinatingly contradictory figure. The song addresses the sexual double standard wracking country music, pop culture, and society as a whole by pointing out that the wild women Thompson scolded in song had often been led astray by unfaithful men themselves. (The A.V. Club )

As someone for whom country music provided a sort of aural wallpaper for her early childhood, I wanted to highlight this because it counters the image of the strong, country woman, and at the time, perfectly illustrates its contradictory nature in being a tough cookie, but also one who "stands by her man." (Plus, you know, that song was co-written by a man.) In his piece for The Atlantic , Jonathan Bogart called Wells a "feminist country godmother to Britney Spears," but I'm uncomfortable tossing the feminism label around casually. I rarely blog about country music, or can't, without pointing out its often problematic nature (and its image of being the domain of the evangelical, confederate flag in the garage, set). But its early roots offered an image of women, particularly of rural, and economically disadvantaged women, that wasn't seen in the Leave It To Beaver era, and one that I most associate with the women in my own family. R.I.P.