On May 3, 1952, thirty-two-year-old Ellen Muriel Deason stepped into Owen Bradley’s Castle Studio inside the Tulane Hotel in Nashville to sing J. D. Miller’s answer song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” largely because her husband, Johnny Wright, talked her into taking the $125 union scale session fee.
At the time, the woman billed as Kitty Wells was preparing to retire from the road to raise their three children—Ruby, born in 1939, Bobby, born in 1942, and Carol Sue. She and Wright had met in 1935 when she was sixteen and ironing shirts for $9 a week at the Washington Manufacturing Company in Nashville, marrying two years later on October 30, 1937, when both were eighteen.
In 1943, Wright gave his wife the stage name Kitty Wells, borrowed from a nineteenth-century folk ballad her father, railroad brakeman Charles Cary Deason, used to play on the guitar. Across the late 1940s, while Wright built his own career alongside brother-in-law Jack Anglin in the duo Johnnie & Jack, the family moved between radio stations in Knoxville, Raleigh, Decatur, and Shreveport’s *Louisiana Hayride*, packing their three children and instrument cases into a single car.
When Decca Records released “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” in the summer of 1952, the single spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and sold more than 800,000 copies, making Wells the first solo female artist to top the country charts. Although the Grand Ole Opry initially barred the record from its stage and NBC radio briefly censored its lyrics, the breakthrough turned the mother of three into a headliner earning up to $2,000 a night.
Rather than touring separately as her career surpassed his, Wright combined their dates with Johnnie & Jack and managing partner Jim Denny to keep the household together on the highway. During the school year, the couple returned to their brick home on Lone Oak Road in Madison, Tennessee, along Old Hickory Lake, where Wells cooked family dinners, canned garden vegetables, and sewed gingham stage dresses and clothes for the children.
Whenever summer vacation arrived, Ruby, Bobby, and Carol Sue climbed aboard the tour bus to perform as part of the package. At age eleven, Bobby played his first professional show in spirits and boots at the Buck Lake Ranch in Angola, Indiana, before landing a regular acting role in the 1960s on the ABC television sitcom *McHale’s Navy*, while teenage Ruby signed her own recording contract at age thirteen and later scored a 1964 Top 20 country hit with “Dern Ya,” an answer to Roger Miller’s “Dang Me”.
After Jack Anglin died in a car crash on March 7, 1963, on his way to the memorial service for Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins, Wright reorganized the road unit with bandleader Bill Phillips into the Tennessee Mountain Boys. Two years later, in 1965, Wright reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart on his own with Tom T. Hall’s recitation song “Hello Vietnam”.
By 1969, the couple brought their touring revue onto television with the syndicated weekly program *The Kitty Wells-Johnny Wright Family Show*, featuring Wright as emcee alongside Wells, Ruby, Bobby, and Carol Sue. Even after Wells earned her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991, Wright continued handling her bookings, stepping onto the stage every night to introduce his wife as the “Queen of Country Music”.
In the 1980s, the pair opened the Family Country Junction museum and studio across from Rivergate Mall in Madison to display her gingham dresses, gold records, and his custom furniture. They remained on the road roughly a hundred days a year until December 31, 2000, when eighty-one-year-old Wells and eighty-six-year-old Wright played their final concert together at their grandson John Sturdivant Jr.’s Long Hollow Jamboree in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
For the next eleven years, the retired couple stayed at their lakeside residence in Madison, surrounded by three children, eight grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren. Every morning, they sat together on the porch overlooking Old Hickory Lake to drink coffee and read fan mail, and on October 30, 2010, family members gathered at the house to celebrate their seventy-third wedding anniversary.
When Wright died at their Madison home on September 27, 2011, at age 97—thirty-three days before their seventy-fourth anniversary—their son Bobby noticed his mother repeatedly turning her head toward the empty chair in the living room where her husband had sat for decades.
Less than ten months later, on July 16, 2012, ninety-two-year-old Wells died at the same Madison home following complications from a stroke and was buried beside Wright at Spring Hill Cemetery in Nashville, just down the road from where two eighteen-year-olds had started their life together in 1937.