Things calmed down quite a bit at our house on Monday, so I had a lot of time to read. I ended up covering a big portion of Tammy Wynette’s life in Jimmy McDonough’s biography. At the beginning of Monday’s reading, Tammy was getting set to release “Stand By Your Man.” By the end, she was deeply into prescription drugs and beholden to her husband, George Richey.
The heavy is Wynette’s 5th husband, music industry hanger-on George Richey. People surrounding Wynette generally despised Richey. McDonough notes that Richey refused to be interviewed for the book – and also savages him. To many, Richey was a “Mr. Tammy Wynette,” a gold digger who enriched himself at Tammy’s expense. Unable to live without a man or to direct her own life, Tammy seemed destined to end up with someone else making the trains run for her.
An anecdote that reveals the depths to which Wynette had fallen is her alleged kidnapping in 1978. Wynette stumbled into a small home in Pulaski, Tennessee, and told the residents who she was and that they needed to call the police and report her kidnapping. The media and the public responded with skepticism – and McDonough clearly regards the episode as a hoax.
McDonough’s prose is top rate. While he admits that he is not a musician, he knows a lot about Wynette’s career and has very strong opinions on her songs. The pages turn with easy and the reader has no problem staying engaged. The lone drawback is that McDonough presents far too many footnotes. The reader doesn’t know whether the skip the footnotes or read them and break the flow of the story. I’ve read most of the footnotes, because they are fairly interesting.
So, I’m left chugging toward the finish with Tammy out on the road in the early 1980s, earning big money as a country legend. Her hit-making days are behind her and her she’s slipping farther into prescription pill addiction.
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