Tammy Wynette’s 40-Year "Stand"

Tammy Wynette photo courtesy of tammywynette.com.

Aug. 28, 2008 — Today is a major anniversary in country music: 40 years since Tammy Wynette recorded the classic "Stand By Your Man." The song earned controversy at the time — it was considered subservient by members of the women’s right movement, which was just beginning to take hold — but it still caught on with the public, crossing over to pop radio and becoming Tammy’s signature song.

In actuality, "Stand By Your Man" did not exist when Tammy first entered the Columbia Recording Studios that day. She recorded three songs and had some extra time left on the session, so she and producer Billy Sherrill went to work writing in a separate room while the musicians took a break. Billy had a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled "Stand By Your Man" as a potential title, and they crafted it very quickly.

"I don't know why that idea came to me that way," Billy told The Tennessean. "I'd heard ‘Stand By Me,’ by Ben E. King. I had a sheet of paper, and on it I had written ‘I'll Stand By You’ and ‘Please Stand By Me’ and all kinds of titles. One day, I was in bed and I just thought, ‘Stand By Your Man,’ and the other stand-bys just flew right out the window."

When they took the completed song back to the musicians, Tammy turned her back to the control room, sat on a stool and crossed her legs. She barely moved as she belted out the song — incredible given the intensity with which she delivered it.

"She hit that note at the end, and I knew it was going to be good," Billy said. "She told me, ‘You know the terrible thing about this?’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You can go home and do what you do, but I'm going to have to sing this the rest of my life and hit that high note.’ But that was the song, so it had to be done that way."

It earned Tammy a Grammy Award, became the title of her autobiography and generated further controversy when Hillary Clinton used it to defend her husband on an installment of 60 Minutes. Versions of the song appear in the movies Five Easy Pieces, The Crying Game, Sleepless In Seattle and Sordid Lives. Tammy’s rendition has also been enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame.