In-Person: WHY TAMMY WYNETTE MATTERS by Steacy Easton

Join us for an in-person event with Steacy Easton to celebrate the release of Why Tammy Wynette Matters! For this event, Easton will be joined in conversation by Francesca T. Royster.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

How Tammy Wynette channeled the conflicts of her life into her music and performance.

With hits such as “Stand By Your Man” and “Golden Ring,” Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity. But there were other sides to the first lady of country. Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette’s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art.

Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about—fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness. Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician’s license. Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette’s performance of “Apartment #9”—and it’s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written. Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius. Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits.

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Steacy Easton has written about country music for NPR, Slate, and the Atlantic. They are a PhD student in critical disability studies at York University.

Francesca T. Royster is a professor of English at DePaul University, author of Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon, and coeditor of “Uncharted Country,” a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies on race and country music.

Accessibility: This event will be at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space on the ground floor. We have an ADA bathroom, adjustable lighting, and reserved parking in the lot behind the store. Face masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. For ASL Interpretation, reserved seating, or other access requests, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.