Welcome back to Country Music 4 Ever! Today I want to talk about the first big female star in country music, Kitty Wells.

She was born Ellen Muriel Deason in Nashville, Tennessee on August 30, 1919. During the Great Depression in 1934, Kitty dropped out of school to work at the Washington Manufacturing Company, where she made nine dollars a week ironing shirts. She then began performing on radio stations with her sisters and her cousin as the Deason Sisters.

At age 18, Kitty married Johnnie Wright. The couple began performing with Johnnie’s sisters. Johnnie soon began referring to his wife as “Kitty Wells,” which was a name taken from a nineteenth-century song recorded by the Pickard Family.

In 1950, Kitty began recording songs for RCA, but found no success. In 1952, however, Kitty was a 33-year-old wife and mother when her song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” became a hit and made her a star. The song was an answer to Hank Thompson’s song “The Wild Side of Life.”

“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was a very controversial song at the time and radio stations hesitated to play it, but it eventually went all the way to number one and sold 800,000 copies in its initial release.

Kitty went on to record countless other songs from a woman’s perspective, which was a new concept at the time.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon!