Kitty Wells
photo: capricorn records · public domain ↗Born Ellen Muriel Deason in Nashville on August 30, 1919, she grew up during the Depression doing whatever paid — ironing shirts, minding a neighbor's boy for $3 a week — while her family sang gospel around the kitchen table and her father picked guitar on the floor beside her. She married Johnnie Wright in 1937, took the stage name Kitty Wells from a parlor song, and spent fifteen years as the "girl singer" in his touring show, cutting unsuccessful gospel sides for RCA. In 1952, mostly for the $125 union-scale fee, she recorded "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," an answer to Hank Thompson's hit blaming women for straying men. "I wasn't expecting it to make a hit," she said. "It was just the women getting back at the men." It became country music's first number-one by a woman, and Wells never left the road again.
The first song on record from Kitty Deason's own mouth was the Carter Family's "Jealous Hearted Me" — she and her cousin sang it as the teenage Deason Sisters on their 1936 WSIX radio debut, and the station cut them off mid-song, deeming it too suggestive. "The song was real popular, and we got so many requests for it that they finally let us sing it," she remembered. It was also the song she was singing the night in 1935 when Johnnie Wright first heard her next door — "Kitty sang 'Jealous Hearted Me' and two or three gospel songs," he recalled — and married her two years later.
listen forThe tune under "Honky Tonk Angels" didn't start with Wells. It's the Carter Family's 1929 waltz "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes" — the same melody Hank Thompson had already borrowed for "The Wild Side of Life," the hit Wells's record was answering. Play the Carter original's plain three-part harmony over Maybelle's picked guitar, then Wells's record: the words are new and pointed, but the tune's familiar, homesick lilt is why, as one critic put it, "practically anyone could hum along" the first time they heard it.