She had not lived a day without him in her life since she was a teenager and when Johnny Wright passed away at home on September 27 2011 at age 97 she faced the first months without him since 1935
She was sixteen year old Muriel Deason pressing shirts at the Washington Manufacturing Company in Nashville when she met Johnny a young cabinetmaker who loved string band music. They married on October 30 1937 when both were just eighteen and began a marriage that lasted nearly seventy four years and raised three children named Ruby born in 1939 and Bobby born in 1942 and Carol Sue born in 1945
Their early life together was spent on the road chasing fifteen minute live radio slots that paid barely enough for gasoline. They performed as Johnnie Wright and the Harmony Girls with Johnny sister Louise and later formed Johnnie and Jack and the Tennessee Mountain Boys with brother in law Jack Anglin. Between 1940 and 1951 the family moved for work in Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina and Knoxville in Tennessee and Charleston in West Virginia and Decatur in Georgia before joining the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport
During a 1943 stop at WNOX in Knoxville station manager Lowell Blanchard suggested she needed a warmer and more memorable stage name. Johnny chose Kitty Wells from a nineteenth century parlor ballad his father often sang around the house
Raising three young children while living out of suitcases wore her down and when Victor Records dropped her in 1950 after a string of quiet releases she decided to retire from singing and stay home for good
That plan changed on May 3 1952 when she walked into Castle Studio at the Tulane Hotel in Nashville only because Johnny insisted. Decca producer Paul Cohen needed a female vocalist to record a response song written by Jay D. Miller to answer a current chart hit by Hank Thompson and Johnny convinced his reluctant wife to take the session for the guaranteed 125 dollar union scale to help pay for their move back to Tennessee
She Walked In Ready To Retire Forever And Walked Out On The Road To Becoming The First Female Superstar In Country Music
The song was It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels and despite an initial broadcast ban by the Grand Ole Opry and the NBC radio network over its frank subject matter it sold more than 800000 copies and spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard country chart. A mother of three who had already quit the business became the first solo woman to top the country charts and began earning more per appearance than the established act of Johnny and Jack
Johnny refused to let jealousy divide their home and instead reorganized the entire touring operation around his wife. He managed her bookings and negotiated her contracts and merged everyone into one traveling family unit. Rather than leave the children behind in Nashville they packed Ruby and Bobby and Carol Sue into cramped sedans and station wagons and pulled a baggage trailer from dance halls to county fairs long before custom tour buses existed
As the children grew the family car became a rolling rehearsal room. Ruby and Carol Sue sang harmony as the Wright Sisters and Bobby learned guitar and drums before landing a television role on McHale’s Navy. Through the 1950s and 1960s the family logged up to 100000 miles a year together while playing up to 250 show dates annually
That tight family circle held Johnny together on March 7 1963 when Jack Anglin was killed in a single car crash on New Due West Avenue in Madison while driving to a prayer service for Patsy Cline. After losing his musical partner of twenty five years Johnny folded his own work permanently into the Kitty Wells and Johnny Wright Family Show which later launched a syndicated television program in 1969
Away from the highway they retreated to a brick home they built near Old Hickory Lake in Madison in Tennessee and opened their Family Country Junction museum and studio there in 1983. At home the woman billed as the Queen of Country Music canned vegetables from her garden and cooked dinner while Johnny spent his afternoons in his woodworking shop or fishing on the lake and neighbors knew them simply as an affectionate older couple sitting together on their porch
They sang side by side until their final farewell concert at the Bell Cove Club in Nashville on New Year’s Eve in 2000 when Johnny was eighty six and Kitty was eighty one. Johnny died thirty three days short of their seventy fourth wedding anniversary and ten months later on July 16 2012 ninety two year old Kitty Wells passed away in that same house beside Old Hickory Lake ending a love story that began with a shirt presser and a cabinetmaker long before fame found them