Tammy Wynette – Our Queen of Stone
She left us with the legacy of being the “First Lady of Country Music”. There’s so much to write about Tammy, but let’s take this moment to remember her as a person. Tammy always kept a large crystal chalice of cotton balls on her living room coffee table. It reminded her of her rising, she liked to tell visitors. Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in Itawamba Country, Mississippi, she had toiled in the fields alongside her grandparents, whose rural farmhouse she grew up in. She frequently talks a lot about those days, as if that time and place weren’t so long ago and far away. She described with sadness in her eyes her musical father’s tragic death from a brain tumour, when she was an infant and how his last wish had been that his baby girl learns to play music. He left her an assortment of stringed instruments to make sure this would come to pass. Growing up fatherless was hard and she had to pick cotton beginning at age seven. One time, when she had to stuff the burlap sack with fifty pound’s worth before she could go to the Tupelo county fair, she got up to some mischief. When nobody was looking, she filled her burlap sack with heavy stones to make cotton weigh the right amount. After it left the scales, she removed the rocks before it got transported to the cotton gin, but horribly, a leftover pebble or two struck the metal innards of the machine, started a spark, and caught 300 pounds of cotton on fire. She confessed and her grandfather sent her back to those blazing hot fields to make up the loss. That’s how she is known as “Our Queen of Stone”.
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