Kitty Wells
Musician · 1919–2012 · Nashville, Tennessee
Best known for
Lead Vocals
Songwriter
Kitty Wells was the first woman to top the country chart and the singer Nashville came to call the “Queen of Country Music.” Her 1952 recording of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” — an answer to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” — broke open commercial country music to women singers and remained on the chart for nearly half a year.
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- Born Ellen Muriel Deason on August 30, 1919, in Nashville, Tennessee; her father was a brakeman on the Tennessee Central Railroad and a part-time musician.
- Sang in her teens with two sisters as the Deason Sisters on Nashville radio beginning in 1936.
- Married Johnnie Wright in 1937; Wright took the stage name “Kitty Wells” from the Pickard Family ballad “Sweet Kitty Wells” for his new bride.
- Decca’s Paul Cohen brought her “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” in 1952; her recording reached No. 1 country in the summer of that year and sold more than 800,000 copies in its initial release.
- Became the first female country singer to release a long-playing album with Kitty Wells’ Country Hit Parade in 1956.
- Elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976.
- Received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 — the first female country singer to be so honored and only the third country artist after Roy Acuff and Hank Williams.
- Was nominated for a Grammy in 1989 for her “Honky-Tonk Angels Medley” with k.d. lang, Loretta Lynn, and Brenda Lee.
- Died July 16, 2012, in Madison, Tennessee, at age 92.
