“It’s true I look totally artificial. But I like to think I’m totally real where it really counts. But my look came from a very sincere place. It’s just a country girl’s idea of glamour.”
Seven decades, and she owned her publishing when almost no woman in Nashville did. The wigs and the theme park got the coverage, but she told NPR the songwriting was the thing that got her out of the Smokies and she was right. She started as Porter Wagoner’s girl singer in a business that had exactly one slot for women, then walked out in 1974 and built something nobody could take from her. One of twelve kids in a house with no electricity.