STAND BY: The Balladography of Tammy Wynette

In her final years touring, Tammy Wynette would disconnect herself from a portable IV line just long enough to walk onstage and sing, then reconnect it the moment she stepped off. It is a fitting image for a woman whose signature song asked women to endure, and whose own life asked the same thing of her, again and again, in ways both chosen and imposed. STAND BY: The Balladography of Tammy Wynette traces her path from a Mississippi cotton farm and a father's dying wish that she learn his piano, through beauty school and single motherhood, to the twenty-minute studio session that produced the best-selling single by a woman in country music history. It follows her tumultuous marriage to George Jones, a duet partnership that outlasted their divorce by two decades, an unlikely 1991 hit with British dance act the KLF, and the genuinely unresolved questions, addressed honestly rather than sensationalized, surrounding a disputed 1978 incident and the family dispute that followed her 1998 death. Grounded in the historical record, this balladography asks what it actually costs a person to keep proving, night after night, exactly how much she can endure.