Kitty Wells

Kitty Wells, born in 1919, American country music vocalist, best known for her song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952). In the late 1940s and early 1950s Wells helped invent a female style of country music that took the cheating, drinking, honky-tonk lifestyle idealized by male country singers and depicted it from an assertive, mistreated housewife’s point of view. As the first female country singer to achieve and sustain success as a solo performer, Wells helped pave the way for singing legends Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline.

Born Muriel Deason in Nashville, Tennessee, Wells began singing as a back-up vocalist in 1936 for country music singer Johnnie Wright on radio station WSIX in Nashville. The following year the two married and she took her stage name from a folk song. In 1938 Wright formed a duo with musician Jack Anglin, which became known as Johnnie & Jack. Wells began touring with the duo, singing solos as well as background harmonies. Her career took off in 1952, when she began working with legendary Nashville producer Owen Bradley. Her first release, “It Wasn’t God That Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was a woman’s response to country musician Hank Thompson’s popular single of the time, “The Wild Side of Life” (1952). Wells’s song became the first country single by a woman to reach number one on Billboard magazine’s country music charts.

Wells joined the Grand Ole Opry , a stage and radio show broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee, in 1952 and continued to respond to male lyrics by releasing songs such as “Paying For That Back Street Affair” (1953), which followed Webb Pierce’s 1952 hit “Back Street Affair.” From 1952 to 1965, Wells released 35 hit singles, including “Release Me” (1954), “Makin’ Believe” (1955), and “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (1958). She continued to record through 1989. In 1969 Wells and her husband began hosting a television program, “The Kitty Wells/Johnny Wright Family Show,” which ran for several years.

Wells was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976. She was presented with the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award in 1985, and received the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.