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Friday, December 18, 2020

Country Music Time - Kitty Wells

 

A Wound Time Can't Erase

Country Music Time
Kitty Wells
With The Jordanaires Courtesy of Columbia
Decca Records DL 4554
1964

From the back cover: If you are sincere in feeling that you must surely be one of Kitty Well's greatest admires, you can count yourself a member of a very exclusive club. Membership is limited to six persons: Carol Sue Strudivant and Ruby Jean Stephenson, both of Nashville, Tenn., John Robert Wright Jr. of Hollywood, Calif., and John R. Wright Sr. and Frank G. Clement, also both of Nashville – and you.

Carol and Ruby are Kitty's married daughters, John the youngest is her television actor-son, and John Sr. is Johnny Wright, Kitty's husband of 27 wonderful years. Frank Clement is not in the family, but rather he is Tennessee's distinguished governor.

That Governor Clement is every bit as much an admirer of Kitty  as you and her immediate family was vividly proven in a statement of the Governor's. "In addition to her artistry," he told an audience of the most successful singers and songwriters, "Kitty has demonstrated that she is an outstanding wife and mother in keeping with the finest traditions of Southern womanhood."

Then, on the strictly professional side of her personality, Kitty won this tribute from Nashville's most respected writer, Charlie Lamb: "The pros always act like pros. When Kitty Wells walks into the studio, she greets everybody cordially, walks over to the microphone and sings; no temperament, no falderol, merely perfection. It is easy to see why she is the Queen Of Country Music." 

Few of Nashville's recording artists are Nashville natives, as Kitty is. Her parents were a railroader and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Season, who christened their bright-eyed baby Muriel. At 15 she was playing guitar and singing spirituals. Three  years later she met at Mount Juliet, Tennessee's handsome young Johnny Wright, and from that moment her life and her love were dedicated to him. Together they became famed country talents. Kitty as a solo performer and Johnny with his Tennessee Mountain Boys partner, the last Jack Anglin. Along the way Kitty's stage name was borrowed from a song, "I Could Marry Kitty Wells," popularized in the early 1930s by a Grand Ole Opry group, the Picard Family.

I've Thought Of Leaving You
Begging To You
B. J. The D. J.
Old Records
As Usual
Going Through The Motions Of Living
Gonna Find Me A Bluebird
This White Circle
A Wound Time Can't Erase
Password
(I Didn't Have To) Break Up Someone's Home
Before This Day Ends

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