The first time I heard country music and actually liked it was 1971.
It was a movie I had been looking forward to seeing — Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” — and the very first thing on the soundtrack was Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By Your Man.”
It wasn’t like anything I had ever heard before.
I bought an album of Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits that summer and played it again and again.
A few years later, Robert Altman made his magnum opus “Nashville,” and Karen Black from “Five Easy Pieces” played the character that was based on Wynette.
In 1981, one of my favorite actresses, Annette O’Toole, played Wynette in “Stand By Your Man,” a made-for-TV biopic in which she did her own singing.
As a television movie, it doesn’t rise to the heights of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” or “Sweet Dreams,” the biopics about Loretta Lynn or Patsy Cline, which earned an Oscar for Sissy Spacek and a nomination for Jessica Lange. Then again, Wynette was maybe half a step below Lynn and Cline.
Wynette may have been best remembered for her collaborations with one of the biggest country stars of them all, George Jones. They toured together, recorded together, were married for nine years and had a child together.
Wynette died young, a month shy of her 56th birthday, and while she may not measure up to Lynn, she’s in a class of country singers where it doesn’t take long to call roll.
And even though it has been a quarter of a century since she died, a Showtime limited series about her relationship with Jones — “George and Tammy” — came out less than a year ago.
Jessica Chastain plays Tammy, and if there’s an irony in it, it’s that she just won an Oscar last year for playing another Tammy, Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”
Chastain is good in both, and she follows in O’Toole’s footsteps by singing Wynette’s songs herself. She’s not quite up to the level of Spacek as Lynn in 1979, but Spacek didn’t get signed as a country singer when starting out for one reason.
They said she sounded too much like Loretta Lynn.
At any rate, Wynette was a wonderful singer in her own right, and she could put a sob in her voice unlike anyone else.
Here’s a medley of her best songs from late in her career, performed wirth Dolly Parton on Dolly’s television show.