Tammy Wynette Stands by Her Song on Loyalty

When she released “Stand by Your Man” in 1968, Tammy Wynette did more than score what was to be her signature hit. Those were times of bitter cultural combat in America, and the song put the slightly built, Mississippi-born country singer into the line of fire.

“Billy Sherrill (Wynette’s producer, who co-wrote the song with her) and I were put down by certain groups because of that song,” Wynette, who sings tonight at the Crazy Horse Steak House, recalled in a recent phone interview from her home in Nashville.

At a time when a gathering women’s movement was urging equal footing between the sexes, “Stand by Your Man” seemed to advocate an opposite, traditional ideal. The woman’s role is to be a long-suffering cheerleader and support system, no matter what, the lyric suggested: The man comes first.

“You’ll have bad times, and he’ll have good times, doin’ things you just don’t understand,” Wynette sang in her choked voice. “But if you love him, you’ll forgive him, even though he’s hard to understand.”

More than 20 years later, “Stand by Your Man” still stands as a monumental pop moment--not for what it says about sex roles, which is almost beside the point, but for what it says about the strains implicit in the monogamous ideal.

The climactic point of the song comes in the last chorus. Wynette’s voice rises to a peak on the line, “Keep givin’ all the love you can,” her voice clenching around that last syllable as if she were a mountain climber trying to keep a crucial and tenuous grip. If the lyric states a traditional ideal--that it’s a woman’s task to summon the forbearance and forgiveness needed to sustain a relationship with an all-too-fallible partner--Wynette’s delivery is a cry of anguish over the reality of the situation. It’s the cry of a woman who fears that, no matter how hard she tries, perfect devotion, unswerving commitment and support are just too much to ask.

It’s that contradiction that gives the song its great emotional resonance and lends it a universality.

“I’ve tried through the years to analyze why people have liked the song and kept demanding the song,” Wynette said. “The only thing I can come up with is that it’s what they really would have liked to have happen in their lives. Maybe it’s only a fantasy. Maybe it’s something they dream about that never works for them.”

“I believe in what the song says” about traditional values, Wynette added, noting that she and co-writer Sherrill both grew up in rural Southern communities where “the man was the head of the household, and there were no ifs, ands or buts about it.”

“But,” she continued in a bright, sturdy twang, “I am an independent person. I’m not going to do something I don’t want to do because a man tells me to do it. Maybe I’m contradicting myself.”

Reading “Stand by Your Man” as a simple, straightforward, one-dimensional message song about traditional values is a mistake. The contradictions Wynette speaks of are its grand essence.

Those contradictions certainly were at play in her own life. At the time “Stand by Your Man” became a hit, Wynette already had been through two marriages and was getting ready to exchange rings for the third time, with country idol George Jones. That turbulent relationship ended after seven years, and so did a fourth marriage. But for almost 13 years, Wynette has been standing by her fifth husband, musician George Richey.

Wynette was a dominant figure in country music from her debut in 1966 through the late ‘70s. But the ‘80s were a fallow period for her.

Wynette is pleased with her latest album, “Heart Over Mind” (the 52nd album of her career, including various hits collections and duet releases with George Jones), although it hasn’t yielded a hit single. Her next single is “We’re Strangers Again,” a duet with Randy Travis from Travis’ new album, “Heroes and Friends.”

Wynette said that she and Travis, a 31-year-old who has been on the country scene for five years, have been sharing bills regularly the past year.

“I see how eager and enthused and excited he is about the business, and that helps me,” she said. Wynette says she expects to continue on with “just the usual --I’m working 150 to 200 days a year. I haven’t changed much in 25 years.”

“I want to have hit records again, Number 1 records, and I believe I can,” said the singer, who has had 20 number one hits on the Billboard country charts, the last in 1976. “But if I don’t, I would be stupid, and so ungrateful, to complain. How many people have had the opportunity to do what I have done for 25 years?”