Country's 'first lady' Wynette dead at 55

Wynette, who had a history of health problems, died Monday evening at her home, said spokesperson Wes Vause. The cause of her death was not immediately disclosed.

Her 1968 top-seller, ''Stand by Your Man,'' which she co-wrote with her producer Billy Sherrill, became her signature song, with its advice to forgive one's mate because ''after all he's just a man.'' But her throbbing voice in other tunes, such as ''Till I Can Make It on My Own,'' expressed flashes of independence.

She was one of country music's greatest success stories, catapulting from a job in a beauty shop to a three-time winner of the Country Music Association's female vocalist of the year award - 1968 to 1970.

AP PHOTO "First lady of country music" Tammy Wynette died Monday at the age of 55. The cause of Wynette's death was not immediately disclosed.

Country music fans polled for the annual Music City News awards voted her a legend in 1991, but she said it was premature.

''I don't consider myself a legend. I think it's kind of overused,'' she said.

Throughout her 25-year career, her stormy marriages and hospital stays, even a kidnapping and beating for which no one was ever convicted, threatened to overshadow one of the most successful singing careers in country music history. But she didn't emphasize the negative.

''I've had a wonderful life,'' she said in a 1991 Associated Press interview. ''I absolutely feel I've been blessed tremendously. I can't complain at all.''

Besides ''Stand by Your Man,'' Wynette's hits included ''D-I-V-O-R-C-E,'' ''I Don't Wanna Play House,'' ''Womanhood,'' ''Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad,'' ''Singing My Song'' and ''The Ways to Love a Man.''

In the fall of 1993, she teamed up with fellow country queens Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn to record the album ''Honky Tonk Angels.'' She also recorded several duets with country star George Jones, to whom she was married from 1969 to 1975.

Wynette was born Virginia Wynette Pugh on a cotton farm in Itawanba County, Miss. She picked cotton as a child, and as a young woman worked as a waitress, a doctor's receptionist, a barmaid and a shoe factory worker.

In the mid-1960s, she was working as a beautician in Birmingham, Ala., and making periodic 180-mile trips to Nashville in hopes of getting discovered as a singer.

She visited music business offices in Nashville and caught the eye of Grand Ole Opry star Porter Wagoner who asked her to sing at his road shows.

Shortly thereafter, she met record producer Billy Sherrill who recorded her for Epic Records and launched her career.

She was hospitalized for various ailments dozens of times, and admitted in the late 1970s to being dependent on painkilling drugs.

In 1978, Wynette was abducted at a Nashville shopping center, driven 80 miles in her luxury car, beaten and released by a masked assailant, who was never identified or arrested arrested, but Wynette said a few years later that the man apparently ended up in prison for another crime.

Wynette is survived by five daughters and one son, children from her five marriages.

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