Pop Music Review : TAMMY : Slick Moments Aside, the Passion Still Comes Through When the ‘First Lady’ Sings

What has to be surprising at this stage of Tammy Wynette’s career is not that the singer’s shows are often slick and pat but that just as often a genuine life and passion still comes through in her vocals.

If anyone has a right to be burnt out, it is she. Wynette came to her reign as the “First Lady of Country Music” only after a life of poverty and hardship. Since her first success in 1966, Wynette has churned out 51 albums--compared with, say, Bruce Springsteen, who in a career only 7 years shorter has waxed a mere nine LPs. During that time, she has survived producer Billy Sherrill’s mulchy arrangements, a bottle-torn marriage with George Jones and a traumatizing kidnap in 1979, all on top of a full-tilt recording and touring schedule.

Portions of her late show at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana on Monday did have the sheen of a rote Vegas revue, and that city must be having a shortage of spangles and sequins after the quantity expended on Wynette’s three costume changes. But some songs also rang so true it hurt.

Backed by a hot seven-piece band and two backup vocalists, Wynette came on stage in a backless blue metal-flake dress and launched into a lackluster “My Man (Understands).” She dispatched a medley of her ‘60s hits, including “Apartment 9,” “I Don’t Want to Play House,” “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” and “Singing My Song,” so slickly that they could have been coated in Crisco.

But while much of her stage patter sounded like a worn script, when Wynette announced that a song was special to her, she clearly meant it. When she arrived at the first of these, “Til I Can Make It on My Own,” the very air in the club seemed to change, becoming a charged conduit for the tremendous emotion pouring out of the slight singer.

At such times, all the tugging elements that go into Wynette’s best lyrics are also implicit in her voice: a painful vulnerability backed by spunk and grit, compassion and outrage, an independence and a plea that independence won’t be needed.

Though not noted for feminist manifestos, Wynette’s songs express a great resilience, expressing an ability to go head-to-head with a man anytime, as early as on 1967’s “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.” Even that anthem to spousely fealty, “Stand by Your Man,” posits that it is the woman’s part to be strong because: “After all, he’s just a man.” Though she has penned some of the most enduring songs in country, when she’s caught up in a song, Wynette could be singing vowel sounds and still communicate the complex state of womankind.

All Wynette had to say about her voice during Monday’s show was, “I may not be the best, but I damn sure am the loudest.”

That may have been the only quality to come through on several songs. A gospel medley was nearly as pat as her ‘60s package, and the four selections from her new “Next To You” album also gave her voice little to hold on to.

That expressive magic did come to the fore again, though, on “When the Grass Grows Over Me” (a song penned for ex-husband Jones), on the timeless “Stand by Your Man,” and on the encore, “Beneath a Painted Sky,” a ballad yearning for the innocence and surety of childhood.