1975 Tammy Wynette: Stand By Your Man

Just as the Great Grey Shrike is but an infrequent visitor to the UK, country music is an infrequent visitor to its top ten. The genre has never really taken hold on these shores and I think that's partly due to the reason that, just like the savage feeding habits of that 'butcher bird', country music tends to be savagely straightforward in it's internal morality; the lovin' and the hurtin' is cast in black or white and shot through with a God fearin' religion that us British pop music fans tend not to have an appetite for. Country rarely does the ambiguity or irony that we love and 'Stand By Your Man' is no exception to this.

Originally recorded in 1968, 'Stand By Your Man' is to country what 'Stairway To Heaven' is to rock - that is, a copper bottomed standard that even non genre fans will recognise from the off, though it's a song that tends to split opinion down the middle. For every heart warmed by the 'my man, right or wrong' message, there is one chilled by the unquestioning subservience of the female role that the song promotes. Feminists have had daggers drawn for Wynette because of it from day one, but for my own part I don't have too much of a beef either way. I'm happy to take it on it's own merits; if Wynette is happy enough to stand by her man whenever he's been horsing around then I'm happy enough not to criticise. She did co-write the song after all so it's not like she's been fed the lines puppet-like.

'Stand By Your Man' is typical nodding country fodder of plodding upright bass drenched with a steel guitar wash though its rescued from its own stereotype by the sincerity of Wynette's vocal. It cracks and wobbles along from the opening "Sometimes its hard to be a woman", but while it never sounds false or pantomime, neither does it manage to move me in anyway. By trying so hard to rev the emotional engine Wynette only succeeds in flooding it, and for all its iconoclasm my base response to 'Stand By Your Man' is a shoulder shrugging 'so what'?

I've always thought this tale of female devotion would have sat well as an ironic B side with Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' though I don't think many country fans would have appreciated it. Because maybe I'm being unfair, but by 'country fans' I can't help but picture the bearded rednecks crying into their beer while Jake and Elwood perform the song in 'The Blues Brothers', imbuing the lyrics with a level of seriousness that allowed no room for irony or the suggestion that none of the words came from the heart. On the other hand, I suspect Gaynor's fans would have found it a hoot. In such small observations the battle lines of my own taste in music are demarcated.