“Stand By Your Man” is one of the most iconic songs in country music history. When it was released in September of 1968 it was an instant hit, one that catapulted Tammy Wynette to superstardom. It’s ranked number #1 on Country Music Television’s 100 Greatest Country Songs of all time. This is because it is a really great song.
So why do so many people hate it? Why do contemporary female country artists resent it? Why is Tammy Wynette remembered as an anti-feminist, as the “little woman standin’ by her man?” (Hillary Clinton, responding to what she was not.)
The answer is because the song itself can come off too pro-patriarchy if you want it to. But it can also go the other way. Textual criticism is tough because there’s not much there, and it’s really a matter of what you project into it.
Wynette and her writing partner Billy Sherril wrote the song in under 20 minutes. Neither of them thought it would be a hit. It was one of the first songs Tammy had ever written and when she played it for George Jones he thought it was pretty bad. So her initial relationship with the song was one of resentment. After it got big she warmed up to it, but she didn’t think much of it at first.
You can argue the song was a hit because it exploited the patriarchal affinity of country listeners, but I don’t think you can really condemn someone to a life of being the antifeminist sucker of the country music world for a love song she co-wrote in less than half an hour at the beginning of her career. Wynette was literally forced to defend that song until she died. She maintained it was about accepting someone despite their flaws.
TW was singing from some real, down home experience. She is the tragic country queen. She grew up dirt poor and picked cotton from the time she could walk. She married her first husband before she graduated high school and he was a dick. They had three kids before she left and took them all to Nashville, singing in dive bars to get by. Then she married Don Chapel, who she left for George Jones, (the booziest booze hound of country music, who reportedly once fired a shotgun at her in a drunken rage) who she divorced in 1975. She would marry two more times and have an affair with Burt Reynolds before she died.
So the hurt in her songs is the hurt of her heart.
That’s why her stuff is so raw, G.
She was a woman who was not afraid to go it alone, but who also kept remarrying drunken assholes. She built her career on her own talent. She moved to Nashville with three kids and no job and became the first country musician to go platinum. She speaks about her tumultuous relationships with grace, and has fondness for the men she has loved and left. She appreciates little things like having the door held open for her, or a chair pulled out. She continued to record with George Jones for 10 years after divorcing him.
What does that make her? Too complicated for 500 words and cursory internet research. We should all read her autobiography and at least one of the two biographies on her life if we want to know more, I think.