Kitty Wells, 1919–2012

Kitty Wells was about to quit performing and become a housewife when she entered a Nashville studio in 1952 to record a riposte to the country hit of the day. Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” blamed a “honky-tonk angel” for breaking up a man’s marriage. In direct response, Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” took issue with blaming the woman. “Too many times married men think they’re still single,” she sang in unwavering tones. “That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.”

Wells’s hit was “as brash and defiant for its time as more celebrated musical revolutions to come involving Elvis Presley’s thrusting hips and the Beatles’ rock expansion,” said the Los Angeles Times. The NBC radio network and the Grand Ole Opry banned the song for being too suggestive, but soon relented, in part because Wells herself was unfailingly demure, said The New York Times. “At a time when divorce rates were rising and sexual mores changing in postwar America, the song, with lyrics by J.D. Miller, resounded like a

protofeminist anthem.”

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Wells was an unlikely revolutionary. Born in Nashville as Muriel Ellen Deason, she recorded gospel and country songs in childhood before marrying country musician Johnnie Wright, who encouraged her to adopt her stage name. Known as the “Queen of Country Music” she “effectively kicked down the doors for every female superstar in the genre that has come since,” said Billboard. Wells regularly appeared on the country charts from 1952 through 1979, and remains the third most successful “of any female vocalist in the genre’s history."