Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough

(Viking, 432 pages, $27.95)

Tammy Wynette’s third husband, George Jones, once told the whole life story of the First Lady of Country Music with a single line, said John Sledge in the Mobile, Ala., Press-Register. Country singers, Jones said, “gotta stay sad.” Wynette, who died at 55, in 1998, secured her place in country music’s pantheon by singing about heartache with a power that could only come from a woman who lived with “bocoodles of it.” From 1966 to 1976, she notched 17 No. 1 singles, including her signature song, “Stand by Your Man.” Still to come were her fifth unhappy marriage and countless fresh battles with sickness, alcohol, and drugs. Plenty has been written about her before, but until this compelling account, no one had delivered a fair-minded and comprehensive biography.

Wynette appears to have been “endlessly needy,” said Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. She quit school at 17, just to spite a man by marrying his brother. When that match didn’t pan out, she moved to Nashville and connected with producer Billy Sherrill, who made her a star. Soon after she married Jones, in 1968, “he was drunk and she was popping pills.” But the couple recorded marvelous duets, ensuring that their six-year union would go down as “one of the most turbulent and creatively productive marriages in American musical history.” Nothing that Wynette recorded after the 1970s matched her early work, however, and reading about her downward spiral is “excruciating.”

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Some readers might be repelled by McDonough’s decision to include short mash notes addressed to his subject, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. But I think it works. His conversational approach creates “an intimacy that many biographers covet but few enjoy.” Ultimately, the author’s personality matters much less than his star’s, said Allison Glock, also in the Times. And Wynette is a hard person to like. “She comes across as garden-variety petty,” a woman mostly responsible for her own misery.