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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
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bin Laden and Bush
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The New Crusade:
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March 24 / March
30, 2002
Remembering Tammy Wynette
By David Vest
You don't think of Tammy Wynette as a battered
woman. You think of her as a star, the object of adulation and
perhaps desire. She was the object, too, of envy, even of scorn.
Hillary Clinton let it be known that
she wasn't going to stay home and bake cookies like some little
woman who'd "stand by her man like Tammy Wynette."
Yet, after taking such a public hit, Tammy Wynette went out and
raised money for Hillary's man, Bill, which spoke volumes about
her character. Hillary apologized, which says something about
her, too. Good thing, because if Hillary isn't acting out the
role of a Tammy Wynette today, what would you call what she's
doing?
There is so much attention to what Tammy
Wynette symbolized that we tend to forget her magnificent voice.
Yes, she sometimes had pitch problems and sang off-key, and time
was not kind to her vocal range. But in the beginning, she was
unforgettable. The minute you heard her, she had you by the heart.
There was no way to defend yourself against that depth of emotional
power unless you resorted to sarcasm, as some did. Any voice
so instantly recognizable is easily parodied. And there would
come days when she seemed a parody of herself, days when she,
too, tried to sound like Tammy Wynette and fell short.
I remember the way her music was used
in Five Easy Pieces, a movie in which a battered, abused and
abandoned woman wanted desperately to be like Tammy Wynette.
The woman in the movie could not have known how close she was
to her goal.
I know, because Tammy Wynette was my
friend.
Virginia Wynette Pugh was a great singer
long before the corporate creation known as "Tammy"
was invented on Music Row. Wynette, as she called herself, appeared
one day in the early 1960s at WBRC studios in Birmingham, wearing
a black dress and no make up, standing in the doorway like an
apparition. From where I sat at the piano, she looked like Kim
Novak or Jean Seberg.
She told Country Boy Eddie she wanted
to sing with the band. We played and sang all over Alabama. Sometimes
Wynette and I worked as a duo. The bone-chilling sound of her
voice would have knocked me to my knees if I hadn't already been
sitting down. A truer country heart I've never known.
One night, in a Homewood piano bar, she
perched on a stool and led the drunks in singing, "We all
live in a yellow submarine." She was openly terrified. "I
can't stand them being so close to me," she said.
We were doing a gig the day Jim Reeves
died in a place crash. Later that same week she found the courage
to go with me to a small studio in Birmingham and cut the demo
tracks she would use to try to launch her career in Nashville.
I still have the tapes. They've never been released, but I dig
them out sometimes and listen again to that astonishing voic
e. She sang her own songs in those days, along with a couple
of tunes I had written for her. One of her numbers was called
"Matrimony." The refrain goes, "If you're headed
for that place called matrimony, then I hope you have much better
luck than me." When she got to Nashville, they said her
songs weren't strong enough. Could it be they were too strong?
She made marriage sound like Devil's Island or Botany Bay. I
didn't learn why until later.
One night, long before the fame and the
money and the painkiller pills, Wynette and I were driving home
from a gig. We had probably made forty bucks between us, and
we stopped to unwind at a drive-in cafe out on the Bessemer Superhighway,
the sort of place where you order through a speakerphone and
a teenager brings it out to your car. We sat in the front seat
and drank vanilla milkshakes and talked. I was half in love with
her, but I had no idea how close I was about to get.
"Can I talk to you?" she began.
She talked about stage fright and how hard it was to get up in
front of strangers. I asked her if she knew what the fear was
about. "It's always there," she told me, "and
it always hurts." She went on to say that the fear went
back a long way, that every waking moment was spent fighting
it back. That she had thoughts of asking doctors to try to remove
it surgically. She looked at me to see if I thought she was crazy.
Then she talked about the men who were chasing her and how they
made it worse. "I can talk to you because you're not like
them," she said. I wished I had someplace to hide when she
said that. She told me she could not remember a night when she
didn't lie down afraid to go to sleep, afraid of what might happen,
what she might dream, what she might remember. Afraid to let
go and rest because the pain and the fear might overwhelm her.
"How do you do it?" I asked
her. "How do you go on, feeling that way? How do you stand
up in front of people and sing when you're so scared?"
"I don't know, David," she
said. She was biting back tears by now, without much success.
We talked until long after the milk shakes were gone.
I won't reveal her secrets, but they
wouldn't surprise anyone who knows the later public record --
the stormy marriages, the abusive alcoholics in her life, shock
treatments for depression, the widely-reported kidnapping and
beating in 1978 by a man who has never been held accountable
because his identity to this day remains a mystery. I recall
reading that someone actually accused her of staging her own
beating for "publicity."
Remembering that night at the drive-in,
I can only imagine what it felt like when she realized that even
fame and fortune couldn't keep her safe, that even the great
Tammy Wynette couldn't look in the mirror without seeing a battered
woman.
The last time I saw her, we were standing
in a parking lot outside a night club in Birmingham. The sixties
were winding down. Our work together was done. She was bound
for Nashville and glory, I was headed down another trail. We
didn't talk that night. She stood looking in my eyes. Then, without
warning, she kissed me. Before I could react she was walking
away.
You could say she walked on into history,
but she had to walk through hell to get there. I would like to
think she reached the end of the fear. In later years, although
we didn't keep in touch, I knew she was still my friend because
she left me out of her tell-all autobiography. I bless her for
that, as I bless anyone who ever kept her safe or gave her shelter,
even for an hour or a day.
After a life of converting agony into
art, the woman we called Wynette -- and the world called Tammy
-- is dead. The voice that moved the world is silent now. As
people recall what she meant to them, what better way to respond
to her great gift than by doing something today for battered
women in our own communities? These women may not have Tammy
Wynette 's great voice and wonderful talent, but they count,
too. And we can let them know that someone will stand by them
till, like her, they can make it on their own.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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