That Kitty Wells was a great cook, with a stable family life and a good husband doesn’t make her any less of a revolutionary. In fact without these attributes it is unlikely that she would have been able to kick down the many barriers that she did. That she firmly suggested that the gates of hell should be opened up just a tad, and didn’t kick them down screaming like a banshee doesn’t make her any less important.
After all, what is Rock and Roll about if it isn’t about defying the conventional wisdom, if it isn’t about kicking against the pricks? And country music after the Second World War certainly had a few pricks. The likes of Roy Acuff who was determined that “You can’t headline a show with a woman“, is vital to our story, because he is most famous for an original (though not the original) version of the song we are here to talk about, but before we get onto him, let’s talk about Kitty Wells.
She was the first female country star to sell a million records and get a number one country hit- although Patsy Montana had sold bucketloads before Billboard started compiling the charts. When she busted through that window like a kid full of Coca Cola, behind her immediately clambered the likes of Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Women who were allowed to show that they had balls, precisely because Kitty kept hers under her dress.
“It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels“ is perfect in so many ways. It’s not her song, it was written in 1952 by J.D. Miller, but she made it her own, with the reserved determination that she had so much of. With her sense of right and wrong that, even though she hadn’t felt the pain herself, led her to understand that sometimes men too should take some responsibility. That “It’s time“, to paraphrase Aretha Franklin (and it’s worth doing the finger pointing she does in the Blues Brothers at this juncture, just to get the message across properly) “they face up to the consequences of their actions“.
Poor old Patsy Cline didn’t have the innate strength of Kitty. She knew she was crazy for loving the bastards without getting back the respect that was her due, but she couldn’t help it. It was her fault, as she always saw it, not his. Patsy always wanted to be one of the boys really, she was beautiful and was fragile as a china doll, but she had a big mouth and the loudest laugh in the South. Kitty’s strength lay almost in her very demureness, but that she had a good man behind her should not go unremarked upon either. Johnny Wright and Kitty had a dream marriage that lasts to this day. It was him that told Roy Acuff to go and fuck himself when he suggested that a woman couldn’t headline. It was him who stepped aside from his own successful career as half of Johnny and Jack to let Kitty take the limelight that was her right.
“I’m tonight thinking of my blue eyes”
So how did this happen, what happened? An egalitarian vision of country music was always there. It was songs to sing on the homestead, songs for the whole family, the whole community. The Carter family were the most famous example we have, and they did a song called “I’m tonight thinking of my blue eyes“ which AP Carter had discovered as an old English folk song in one of his many trips, foraging for songs, around the mountain communities. The melody is unmissable, as are its European roots in AP’s lilting accent. Its very simplicity is it’s strength. The Germans have a word for this sort of song, “Ohrwurm”- literally Earworm. It burrows it’s way into the dephts of your consciousness, and stays there.
That AP Carter had had a mistress for years was fine, but for Sarah, his wife and the heart of the group, to leave him for his cousin Coy Bayes was seen as a disgrace. It was a perfect symbol of the second class citizens that Women were at the time. She was allowed to sing, sure, and she had an astonishing voice, but that’s it. No fun for you missy, and breakfast better be on the table, sharp or there’ll be hell to pay.
“The great speckled bird”
Eight or nine years later the country legend Roy Acuff heard a song being performed by a group called the Blackshirts called “The great speckled bird“ loaded with an oblique old testament message, that gets murkier as it gets older. It became a massive hit for Acuff and he even went so far as to name his plane after it. “The Bird“ was unmistakeably cut from the same cloth as “I’m tonight thinking of my blue eyes“, and James Clell Summey’s dobro adds a netherwordly eeriness to the song, as well as lending it more of a touch of what we would recognise today as being “country“.
“The wild side of life”
Such is the story with old songs. They get passed along and bastardised. An evolutionary process, maybe even a genetic one. The next to pick it up- and we are getting closer to where we are headed now- was a certain Hank Thompson, whose „The wild side of life“ had been written by Arlie Carter and William Warren to the same tune as “The great speckled bird”. Warren had seen the wife that had jilted him after only eight months in a run down bar, and felt compelled to write the song that would be at the top of the country charts for three months in her (dis)honour. It is a bitter little number, in parts whining, in parts boorish, in parts pathetic. The melody is still a killer, and the story works as a piece. After all, what is country music without a bitter core at the center of it all, but there was always something about it that grated.
The un-named wife won’t answer his letters, and told him not to phone, so he’s written a song to let her know how bad she’s been. Maybe it’s no great surprise she wasn’t too fussed about taking the calls if this is what was coming.
“I didn’t know that God made honky tonk angels, I might have known you’d never make a wife” has to be one of the meanest couplets in recorded music. The fault is hers, or God’s. Hell, it’s someone elses anyways. Warren didn’t write lovingly signed, romantic little notes scented with perfume. He was writing to tell her how bad she was, and what a fool he’d been for falling for her Devils ways in the first place.
“The glitter of the gay nightlife has lured you, To the places where the wine and liquor flow. Where you wait to be anybody’s baby, And forgot the truest love you’ll ever know“ might have been written by a fifteen year old such is the whiny self justification. He tells it straight that he was the last good man she could have had. The torch that he bore for her was beautiful and real, whereas she was just sent to torment. She is a siren. Somehow sent by God, but doing the work of the devil against good men like him.
But- and let’s not forget- he was in the bar in the first place. This is fine for a man, it is what they do and it’s not for anyone else to say that he shouldn’t be there. But her? How very dare she.
“It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels”
It is this contradiction that Kitty Wells so eloquently shows up in “It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels“. It is the finest and most eloquent retort in musical history. The patient explanation of all that is wrong with these sons of bitches, without having to resort to cuss words and the like. It is a dressing down, a telling off- but a calm one, one part rational to two parts righteous. It could have come from “Kitty Wells’ country cook book”. It was written by a man, but had to be delivered by the right woman for it to work.
The response song has played a huge role in American music since it’s dawn. Examples such as the bizarre “Roxanne wars“, which some claim led to over a hundred different responses to a single early rap track, abound. Hip hop is, of course, littered with them, but the point of “Honky tonk angels“ is that it wasn’t an attack, a brass necked, posturing, call to arms. It was considered and, more than anything, in the right. This, of course didn’t matter originally. The message sounds tame today, but it became a huge hit almost in spite of itself. They even banned it at the Opry.
The Grand Ole Opry even thought "honky tonk angels" was too subersive
“It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels, As you wrote in the words of your song. Too many times married men still think they’re single, That has caused many a good girl to go wrong“. It is a lyric of pure perfection. You meet a girl in a bar and she has to be a paragon, no, a beacon of virtue, whereas you can just carry on with your life? Take some responsibility for your God damn actions man, she implores. What are you, a child?
This is country music America in the 1950′s, a long time before Foxy Brown could rap.
“He fooled you girl, pussy is power, let me school you girl, Don’t get up off it ’till he move you girl, And let no playin’ nigga rule your world and screw you girl”. Pussy is power? Kitty wouldn’t sing that. She didn’t need or want to, but without her the likes of Brown (whatever the questionable merits of her output) wouldn’t be able to nowadays. Full stop.
“It’s a shame that all the blame is on us women, It’s not true that only you men feel the same. From the start most every heart that’s ever broken, was because there always was a man to blame” says it all. Again, respect has to go to the original writer, J.D. Miller. It was him who crafted the response. It was him that, in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, knew that most “Men would sooner die than think”. The trick was- and remains today- to try and get them to.
Kitty Wells’ passive resistance to people thinking that she had no place in the music business worked a charm. “Honky tonk angels” was huge. It was her breakthrough success, and she went on to record over 40 albums for Decca by the end of the sixties. But it was the eloquence of her retort to “The wild side of life“ for which she will always be remembered. A rock and roll gesture from a woman who considered herself first a mother and a wife, a velvet shoed, kick to the balls of those who thought that she should remain as such.
