MARRIED 74 YEARS. AND JOHNNIE WRIGHT STILL LOOKED AT KITTY WELLS THE SAME WAY HE DID IN 1937. There’s this moment on Country’s Family Reunion where Kitty sings “Dust on the Bible” and Johnnie is sitting right beside her. He doesn’t say a word. He just watches her, the way he probably did the first time he heard her voice back when they were teenagers in Nashville. They’d been through everything together by then. She was told women couldn’t sell country records — and what she did next changed the entire genre. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” made her the first woman to top the country charts in 1952. Thirty-five Top Ten hits followed. Fourteen straight years voted the number one female vocalist in country music. But on that stage, none of that mattered. It was just Kitty, singing a gospel song she’d been singing since 1959, with the man she married when she was eighteen sitting close enough to touch. Johnnie passed in 2011. Kitty followed ten months later.
Watch the video at the end of this article. Introduction On a quiet evening that...