The Story Behind “Stand By Your Man”: The Song Tammy Wynette Spent Her Life Defending

A producer reaches into his pocket, pulls out a crumpled slip of paper, and tells his singer they have time for one more song before the studio clock runs out. The session players head for a card game. The producer and the singer climb the stairs to his office. When they come back down, somewhere between fifteen and twenty minutes later, they have a finished song. The singer isn’t sure she likes it. When she plays it for the man she’s about to marry, he tells her he doesn’t care for it either.

That song was “Stand By Your Man.” Tammy Wynette asked her producer not to release it. Instead it became the biggest record of her career, the target of a feminist backlash, a flashpoint in a presidential campaign twenty-four years later, and one of the most recognized country songs ever cut. She spent the rest of her life explaining it. This is the story of what happened in that room in 1968, and why people are still arguing about it long after the last take.

From Cotton Rows to a Nashville Motel

Virginia Wynette Pugh was born on May 5, 1942, on a farm in Itawamba County, Mississippi, so close to the Alabama line that she would claim both states as home for the rest of her life. Her father, William Hollis Pugh, played guitar and sang with a group, and he dreamed of a music career. He died of an inoperable brain tumor when she was nine months old. In his last weeks he carried his baby daughter to the family piano and insisted that she learn to play it when she was old enough.

Her mother, Mildred, went to Memphis to work in a defense plant during World War II, and young Wynette was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents on the farm. Farm life meant chores, and in that part of the South chores meant cotton. She said later that she hated every minute of it, and she sang to pass the hours, often the songs of George Jones, because her mother owned all of his records. She picked up piano by ear and inherited her father’s instruments. She harmonized in a gospel trio with two school friends, and a local Methodist minister put the girls on his Saturday-morning show on WERH radio. At night she listened to Hank Williams.

She married Euple Byrd at seventeen, a month before high school graduation. Her mother refused to sign the paperwork, so her grandfather did. The marriage never had much of a chance. Byrd struggled to hold down steady work, the young couple moved between Tupelo, Red Bay, and Memphis, and the babies kept coming: Gwendolyn in 1961, Jaclyn in 1962, and Tina in March 1965, three months early and barely over two pounds. Tina came down with spinal meningitis a few months later and spent seventeen days in isolation at the hospital. Wynette borrowed money from her uncle to cover the bills. Tina made a full recovery.

To keep the family going, she studied cosmetology and tended bar in Memphis, singing for the customers between orders. By 1964 she was in Birmingham, Alabama, enrolled in beauty school all over again because her Mississippi license wouldn’t transfer. Her uncle worked at WBRC television and helped her land an audition for a country show called Country Boy Eddie. She sang on the program from six to eight every morning, went to class, then worked in a beauty salon for forty-five dollars a week. On her first broadcast she sang Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams” while the camera stayed above her waist, because she was pregnant.

The marriage to Byrd ended in 1965. In January 1966 she packed her three daughters and everything they owned into the car and drove to Nashville. She checked into the Anchor Motel, where she met a young man named Don Chapel, who would become her second husband. Then she started knocking on doors. Musicor, Hickory, Kapp, and Decca all said no. Finally a Nashville producer named Kelso Herston arranged a meeting with a new Epic Records producer named Billy Sherrill.

She walked into Sherrill’s office and pitched him some songs. He liked what he heard, and Wynette’s luck finally turned. Even after the hits came, she never quite trusted that they would last. She renewed her cosmetology license every year for the rest of her life, just in case she ever had to go back to work in a beauty shop.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
The whole Tammy Wynette story, from a Mississippi farm to the top of the country charts.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/08/04/tammy-wynette-artist-deep-dive-working-class-life/

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Billy Sherrill and the Sound of Countrypolitan

Billy Sherrill grew up in Alabama, the son of a traveling Baptist minister, and the first music he ever heard was gospel sung under a revival tent. He loved everything from bluegrass to Bach. When he got behind a control board in Nashville, he built records the way a film director builds scenes: big swells, hushed passages, and a very deliberate sense of when to be loud and when to pull back.

The style got a name, “countrypolitan.” It meant honky-tonk songwriting dressed up in strings and background singers, polished for radio in ways the sparse records of the previous decade never were. Purists grumbled about it then and some still do. But the records sold, and they carried real feeling. Sherrill was also the first to hang the word “teardrop” on Wynette’s voice, and it stuck.

He remembered the day she first came through his door. She didn’t have decent clothes, her hair wasn’t done, and she was scared to death. Every other label in town had already turned her away. She looked, he said years later, like somebody who had been kicked in the teeth so many times that one more wasn’t going to kill her. He changed all that, and he changed her name too. She’d been performing as Wynette Byrd, and he told her she looked like a Tammy, after the Debbie Reynolds movie Tammy and the Bachelor.

Her first single, “Apartment No. 9,” stalled at No. 44 on the country chart. The second, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” climbed to No. 3 in 1967, and after that the hits came in a rush. “My Elusive Dreams,” a duet with David Houston, gave her a first No. 1. “I Don’t Wanna Play House” topped the chart and won her a Grammy. “Take Me to Your World” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” followed in 1968, both No. 1. Sherrill had brought her “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, and she said afterward that she hated not having written it herself, because it fit her life so completely.

None of it came easily. Promoters didn’t want to book a woman, and she recalled realizing she was working in a man’s world. She toured with a band she called the Countrypolitans, a name that tells you how completely Sherrill’s sound had come to define her.

Nashville in the Summer of 1968

By the summer of 1968, Tammy Wynette was one of the hottest names on Music Row. “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” had gone to No. 1 that spring, and the album built around it came out in July. Around her, a different kind of country record was climbing the charts: songs about marriage, money, and small-town hypocrisy, sung by women who sounded like they had lived every word.

The country outside the studio was working its way through a rough year of its own, and the women’s liberation movement was gaining public attention just as Wynette’s career was taking off. Country radio and the jukebox had a way of taking the temperature of ordinary American life, and in 1968 the temperature was running high. Nashville’s women were talking back, and audiences were buying it.

Wynette’s own life that summer was coming apart and coming together at once. Her second marriage, to Don Chapel, was ending. She had been on package tours with Chapel, David Houston, and George Jones, and after an argument with Houston’s management she and Jones began singing “My Elusive Dreams” together on stage. Somewhere on those tour dates she and Jones realized they had feelings for each other. By the end of the year she would be divorced from Chapel and headed toward Jones.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
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https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/09/20/story-behind-harper-valley-pta-jeannie-c-riley/

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Twenty Minutes, a Slip of Paper, and a High Note She Dreaded

The session took place in late August 1968 at Columbia Studio B, the Quonset hut studio on Music Row where Sherrill cut nearly everything he did with Wynette. Most references list the date as August 26. The Library of Congress essay on the record says August 28. Nobody involved seems to have thought to write it down at the time, which tells you how little anyone expected of the last hour of a long day.

Sherrill had called in his A-team. Bob Moore was on bass, Buddy Harman on drums, Ray Edenton on guitar, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, and Pete Drake on steel guitar, with the Jordanaires handling background vocals. They were cutting material for what would become Wynette’s fifth album. With about an hour left, they had a couple of songs Sherrill considered mediocre in the can, and he wanted one more with something extra in it.

He had a slip of paper. Sherrill told the Wall Street Journal in 2013 that he had been carrying it around in his wallet, with some chords and lyrics scribbled on it. His working title was “I’ll Stand By You,” an idea borrowed loosely from Ben E. King’s hit “Stand By Me.” It didn’t sound right for Tammy. In his words, she needed a twist.

He suggested they go upstairs to his office over the studio and finish it there. The story goes that as they climbed the stairs, one of the musicians called out a title: “Stand By Your Man.” That part is legend, and nobody has ever pinned down who said it. What isn’t legend is what the band did while the producer and the singer were gone. They started a poker game.

The twist Sherrill was after was a change of point of view. Instead of a man pleading for loyalty, the song would be a woman talking to another woman, offering advice to a friend who wasn’t sure how to hold on to her husband. He explained it that way to the Journal decades later. It is the detail most people forget when they argue about the song, and it changes how the whole thing sounds.

How long the writing took depends on who’s telling it, the way most stories do once they’ve been told a few thousand times. Sherrill remembered it as a few minutes. The Library of Congress essay says fifteen. Wynette herself said about twenty. Whichever it was, the two of them came back downstairs well inside half an hour with a finished song.

Sherrill sat at the piano and played the new song so the band and the Jordanaires could learn it. He showed them the chords and marked where to go loud and where to go soft, which mattered more to him than almost anything. He wanted an intimate sound, so he brought the musicians and the singers in close around Wynette instead of spreading them around the room. They ran through it a few times and recorded no more than three or four takes. Her voice sits right at the front of the mix.

After the first take, Wynette gave Sherrill a worried look. If this record was a hit, she told him, she was going to have to “hit that God-awful high note the rest of my life.” She wasn’t joking. In a 1994 television interview she said she hadn’t liked the melody, hadn’t liked the high notes, and hadn’t trusted her own writing, especially since she had never written with Sherrill before and knew what a fine songwriter he was. He was the man behind “Almost Persuaded,” after all. She said she begged him not to release the record.

Then she took it home. She played it for George Jones without telling him she had helped write it, and he didn’t care for it. “I went home and played it for George, and he didn’t like it,” she told a British music paper in 1978, and she said that got her off on the wrong foot with the song. Sherrill had no such doubts. He knew he had a hit, and he was about to prove it.

The Guitar Intro That Began as a Tuning-Up

One problem remained, and it was the first few seconds of the record. Pete Drake had opened the song on steel guitar, and Sherrill hated it. Drake was one of the best steel players in Nashville, and his sound would later be heard on Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” so it wasn’t a matter of talent. Sherrill simply heard something different in his head.

The guitarist he wanted was Jerry Kennedy, who had been stuck in Chicago and missed the session. When Kennedy got back to Nashville that Saturday, Sherrill asked him for an opening lick like the one on “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” and made it very clear, in more colorful language, that he did not want another steel intro.

Kennedy pulled his guitar out of the case cold. By his own recollection, the figure that came out was what a player does while tuning up. It took him three or four passes to get it down. He added a harmony part for the lead-up into the chorus, and by his own count he was out the door in fifteen or twenty minutes.

What he left behind is one of the most recognizable openings in country music, a wobbly little phrase that sounds like a musician warming up in the next room. Listeners have been humming it for more than half a century, and it began as an accident. Nashville was full of stories like that, and this one is worth telling right.

A No. 1 Hit and an Ad That Started a Fight

Epic Records released “Stand By Your Man” on September 20, 1968, backed with “I Stayed Long Enough,” a song Wynette had written on her own. By October 12, Billboard reported it on some jukeboxes and getting airplay on select stations, R&B stations among them. It entered the charts on October 19. By November it had reached the top of the country chart.

It stayed at No. 1 for three weeks. Then it crossed over to pop radio and peaked at No. 19 on the Hot 100, the highest any Wynette single ever climbed there. It reached No. 11 on the adult contemporary chart and topped the country chart in Canada. According to the Library of Congress essay, it sold more than two million copies. The album that took its name arrived in January 1969 and became her highest-charting record on the Billboard 200.

Jukeboxes did much of the work in that era. A three-minute single had to grab a room of strangers eating pie, and a record with an unforgettable opening lick and a big vocal finish could do it. “Stand By Your Man” ran two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and it grabbed people.

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Also on Classic Country TV:
Why country songwriters in the jukebox era learned to say everything in three minutes.
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Then came the ad. Someone at Epic had a marketing idea, and the label took out a full-page advertisement in Billboard that billed the record as “Tammy Wynette’s Answer to Women’s Lib.” Sherrill later credited the idea to a young staffer at the label. Nobody in the studio had written the song to be anybody’s answer to anything.

It worked as promotion. It also put a target on the record. The women’s liberation movement was gaining ground, and the ad told the whole country which side of that argument the label thought its new single was on. Feminist critics heard a song that told women to put up with anything. Newsweek was scathing, dismissing it as a song for the put-upon housewife.

Some of the sharpest criticism came from another woman on the country charts. Jeannie C. Riley, who had just topped both the pop and country charts with “Harper Valley PTA,” said the song sounded as if a woman was being told to take whatever a man dished out. Riley’s hit was a story about a woman who refused to be pushed around, so it made sense that she would hear Wynette’s song that way.

There was a real irony in the middle of all this, and Wynette knew it. While she was recording the song that would make her the poster woman for wifely loyalty, she was getting ready to leave her second husband for George Jones.

What Wynette Actually Meant

Listen to the song again with the arguments turned down. It opens with an admission that sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, and nearly everything after that is a friendly, plainspoken pep talk. He’ll have his good times and you’ll have your bad ones. He’s not perfect. If you love him, you’ll forgive him. It isn’t a sermon. It’s the kind of advice one woman gives another across a kitchen table.

The line critics objected to most was the one that says a woman forgives because he’s only a man. Feminists called it a double standard, and Wynette knew they did. On The Tonight Show years later, she acknowledged that some women objected to that line. She said she had never meant it that way. She had daughters, and she would never write anything that belittled them. She thought it was a pretty love song, and she wished a man would stand by his woman just as faithfully.

Her publicist, Evelyn Shriver, recalled a plainer defense. The women Wynette knew growing up, her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, all stood by their men. Nowhere in the song does it tell a woman to be a doormat. It is a song about loyalty as a choice, made by a woman with a mind of her own.

She also drew a line at the movement itself. In comments quoted by American Songwriter, she said she wasn’t interested in digging ditches or climbing telephone poles, and that she didn’t want to lose the small courtesies women had long been extended, like a man opening a door or lighting a cigarette. She wasn’t hostile to the women’s movement. She simply came from a place where those courtesies were treasured, and she said so in public.

Some of the criticism was fair, and it’s worth looking at squarely. Authors Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann argued that the song typecast Wynette as the long-suffering housewife, and the singles that followed didn’t do much to change that. “The Ways to Love a Man,” “I’ll See Him Through,” “He Loves Me All the Way,” and “Singing My Song” all leaned into the same territory, and they were all No. 1 country hits.

But writing her off as a doormat misses most of her catalog. “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” was a wife warning her husband that she could play the same game. “Another Chance,” in 1982, was about a woman who decides not to take her partner back. “Unwed Fathers,” in 1983, took on the shame heaped on teenage mothers. And “’Til I Can Make It on My Own,” which she co-wrote in 1976, was a woman deciding to leave. Wynette herself called it her favorite of everything she recorded.

The woman who sang the ultimate song of wifely loyalty was married five times. The first four marriages ended in divorce or annulment, and by her publicist’s account, when Wynette stopped loving a husband, she was the one who left. She never seemed to find that contradiction troubling. If anything it sharpened her point that the song was about grace inside a marriage, not obedience to it.

The Marriage That Followed the Song

Tammy Wynette and George Jones married on February 16, 1969, in Ringgold, Georgia, five months after “Stand By Your Man” came out. Jones was the voice she had sung along with in the cotton rows as a girl, and now he was her husband. The two of them became a package act, billed as country music’s “President and First Lady,” and their tour bus carried the name “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music.”

They moved into a big plantation-style house in Lakeland, Florida, and built a music park on the grounds. Jones’s recording contract kept them from making records together until 1971, when they cut a remake of his hit “Take Me.” Epic eventually issued seven albums of their duets. Together they sounded like nobody else in Nashville, and the sound wasn’t an act.

But the marriage was a hard one, and the trouble was mostly Jones’s drinking. He missed shows after drinking too much. Wynette tried hiding his car keys to keep him off the road, and one day he couldn’t find them, so he took the keys to their riding lawn mower and rode it into town to buy liquor. It is one of the best-known stories of that marriage, and it is funny and sad in about equal parts.

She filed for divorce in 1973, and they reconciled and recorded “We’re Gonna Hold On,” which became their first No. 1 duet. After a fight late in 1974, she filed again, and this time they went through with it. The divorce became final on January 8, 1975. She told the press that Jones seemed unable to tolerate happiness, and that when everything was going well, something in him had to tear it down.

In her 1979 autobiography, written with Joan Dew, Wynette described frightening episodes from the marriage, including a claim that Jones had chased her through the house with a loaded rifle. Jones denied it in his own autobiography. What the record shows is a marriage that produced some of the finest duets in country music and a great deal of heartbreak on both sides.

Even the divorce didn’t stop them singing. “Golden Ring” and “Near You” both went to No. 1 in 1976. They came back together for “Two Story House” in 1980, and in 1995, after Wynette’s hospitalization, Jones encouraged her to make another album with him. It was called One. The song George Jones didn’t care for in 1968 had come to belong to the woman he would keep singing with, off and on, for the rest of her life.

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https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/05/17/george-jones-whos-gonna-fill-their-shoes-story/

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Hillary Clinton, 60 Minutes, and a Letter That Demanded an Apology

On Sunday, January 26, 1992, immediately after Super Bowl XXVI, CBS aired a special edition of 60 Minutes. Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and running for the Democratic presidential nomination, sat on a couch in a Boston hotel room with his wife, Hillary, across from correspondent Steve Kroft. A woman named Gennifer Flowers had told a supermarket tabloid that she had carried on a twelve-year affair with the governor. The Clintons had gone on television to put the story to rest, and the timing put them in front of a huge audience carried over from the football game.

Bill Clinton denied the affair and acknowledged that he had caused pain in the marriage. When Kroft turned to the state of the Clintons’ marriage, Hillary answered with a line the country would repeat for years: “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” She added that she was sitting there because she loved and respected her husband and honored what they had been through together.

Tammy Wynette was watching from her bed in Nashville. She said later that she came straight up out of it. What set her off, by her own account, wasn’t so much the song as the way she had been dismissed, as if she and her audience were a punch line.

“You have offended every woman and man who love that song.”

— Tammy Wynette, in her open letter to Hillary Clinton, 1992

She wrote an open letter to Clinton and did not soften it. She said she resented the caustic remark, and told the candidate’s wife that she had offended millions of people who loved the song. She added that Clinton had offended every true country music fan and everyone who had made it on their own with no one to take them to the White House. Then she issued a challenge, offering to appear with Clinton on any network, cable channel, or talk show and stand toe to toe.

The Clinton campaign felt the backlash. Hillary told reporters she had never meant to speak negatively about Wynette and that she enjoyed her music. Then she did something more direct: she apologized on television and called Wynette on the phone.

By the time Wynette sat down with Jay Leno, she could see the joke. Hillary Clinton had spent the entire interview standing by her man. Wynette told Leno that Clinton had called, that she had been very nice, and that the questions had come at her so fast she couldn’t think straight. She added that all was well. Wynette even sang at a Clinton fundraiser afterward, to make the point.

Some listeners heard the original remark as a shot at the song alone. Others heard a shot at the working-class women who loved it. Both readings have lasted, and both are part of why the moment is still cited whenever someone wants to talk about how a single line in a high-pressure interview can take on a life of its own. When Wynette died in 1998, the Clintons issued a statement calling her “an American original.”

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Also on Classic Country TV:
A different kind of working-woman anthem, written on a movie set a dozen years after Wynette’s.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/07/30/dolly-parton-9-to-5-true-story-working-women-anthem/

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A Song That Kept Showing Up

Not many 1968 country singles get answered, but this one did. Conway Twitty took “How Much More Can She Stand” to No. 1 in 1971, and Ronnie Milsap topped the country chart in 1976 with “(I’m A) Stand by My Woman Man.” In each case another singer heard Wynette’s record and had something to say back.

The covers piled up. Within two years, according to the Library of Congress, Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Bobby Vinton, and even Lawrence Welk had recorded it. Patti Page put it on Billboard’s easy listening chart in 1968, and Candi Staton took it to No. 4 on the R&B chart and No. 24 on the pop chart in 1970. David Allan Coe cut it in 1981, and Lyle Lovett recorded it for his 1989 album with his Large Band. Lovett liked that the man in the song is a bit of a jerk, and that the song’s answer is to love him anyway.

In 1982, Motörhead’s Lemmy and the Plasmatics’ Wendy O. Williams turned it into a punk duet. The group then known as the Dixie Chicks recorded it in 1998 and, with a straight face, later released it as the B-side of “Goodbye Earl.” Carrie Underwood sang it at the Grand Ole Opry in May 2008. And in 1993, Lovett and Wynette sang it together on The Tonight Show to celebrate her box set.

Overseas, the song had a second life. Reissued in Britain in 1975, it reached No. 1 on the UK singles chart, and it topped the charts in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The British dance duo the KLF later asked Wynette’s permission to build a record around her voice. “Justified and Ancient (Stand by the JAMs)” went to No. 1 in eighteen countries by most accounts, a long way from a Nashville poker game.

Hollywood kept reaching for it, too. It plays over the closing credits of the 1969 French film La Piscine and opens Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces in 1970, one of five Wynette songs that give Karen Black’s waitress her voice. The Blues Brothers Band plays it with visible reluctance in Bob’s Country Bunker. It turns up in My Cousin Vinny, Sleepless in Seattle, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Minnie Driver sings a deliberately awful version in GoldenEye. Even Sesame Street had a go, with a clean-up parody called “Stand By Your Can.”

The honors have kept coming as well. The song won Wynette the 1970 Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, her second win in that category. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2010. CMT placed it at No. 1 on its list of the top 100 country songs, and Rolling Stone ranked it No. 473 on its 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. In 2010, the Country Music Hall of Fame opened an exhibit on her life and career called “Tammy Wynette: First Lady of Country Music.”

Why It Still Matters

“Stand By Your Man” lasts because nobody can settle it. Depending on the year and the listener, the same three minutes can sound like compassion or like surrender, like a love song or like a sermon. A record that keeps making people argue after more than half a century is doing something right.

What tends to get lost in the arguments is the actual record. There is the woman-to-woman voice Sherrill wanted. There is the opening lick that started as a guitarist tuning up. There is the vocal she dreaded singing, delivered with a strength and a crack in it that no one has matched. There is the band pulled in close around her, and the working-class women across America who bought the single, some of whom stood by their men out of love and some out of necessity, and all of whom heard their own lives in it.

Wynette never got to put the argument down. She told Leno she had spent twenty-three years defending the song, and by most accounts she kept defending it to the end. She died on April 6, 1998, at age fifty-five, after years of pain and hospital stays. Her memorial service at the Ryman Auditorium three days later drew about 1,500 people and was carried live on television. Dolly Parton sang.

That’s the real story behind “Stand By Your Man”: a producer with a scrap of paper in his pocket, a singer who didn’t want to sing it, and a song that turned out to know more about people than either of them did. At Classic Country TV, our goal is simple: keep the stories behind the songs alive, especially the ones that get misunderstood the most.

Gear Inspired by the Story

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Home and Kitchen

Lodge 12-Inch Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Skillet
Tammy Wynette liked to cook pinto beans on her tour bus, enough that she wrote a Southern cookbook in 1990. A seasoned cast-iron skillet is the kind of pan that cookbook was written for.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006JSUB/?tag=classiccoun08-20

Lodge 5-Quart Cast Iron Dutch Oven
The pot that pinto beans, chili, and Sunday pot roast were made for. It’s heavy, honest cookware built for a Mississippi-farm kind of supper.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00063RWYI/?tag=classiccoun08-20

Listening and Audio

Audio-Technica AT-LP60X-BK Fully Automatic Belt-Drive Turntable
It plays both 33 and 45 rpm records, which matters, since “Stand By Your Man” first reached the public as a 45. Drop the needle and hear that wobbly guitar intro the way jukebox listeners did in 1968.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N3XJ66N/?tag=classiccoun08-20

Edifier R1280T Powered Bookshelf Speakers
A pair of powered speakers that take a turntable’s RCA output with no separate amplifier. It’s a simple way to give Wynette’s voice the front-and-center placement Sherrill gave it in the studio.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016P9HJIA/?tag=classiccoun08-20

Guitar and Instruments

Snark SN5X Clip-On Chromatic Tuner
Jerry Kennedy’s famous opening lick began, by his own recollection, as the sound of a guitarist tuning up. A clip-on tuner won’t write you a hit, but it will help you find the note.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H74YV56/?tag=classiccoun08-20

Dunlop 83CB Trigger Curved Guitar Capo
Wynette dreaded that high note, and a capo lets a guitarist shift the key of a song like this one to fit a voice, hers or yours. It clamps on with one hand.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JPL14BO/?tag=classiccoun08-20

From the CCTV Shop

Sources

Library of Congress — Holly Gleason’s National Recording Registry essay on the record: the session, the musicians, the guitar intro, chart performance, covers, film appearances, and the 1992 Clinton exchange.
https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/Stand-By-Your-Man_Gleason.pdf

NPR — Anita Bugg’s 2000 feature with interviews of Billy Sherrill and Jerry Kennedy, covering the session, the writing, the intro, the Billboard ad, and Wynette’s defense of the song.
https://www.npr.org/2000/10/28/1113153/tammy-wynettes-stand-by-your-man

Garden and Gun — “Fifty Years of ‘Stand By Your Man,’” with Sherrill’s Wall Street Journal recollection of the slip of paper and Wynette’s 1978 comments on the song.
https://gardenandgun.com/fifty-years-tammy-wynette-stand-by-your-man

American Songwriter — “The Meaning Behind Tammy Wynette’s Controversial Country Classic ‘Stand By Your Man,’” including Wynette’s remarks on the women’s movement.
https://americansongwriter.com/the-meaning-behind-tammy-wynettes-stand-by-your-man/

Democracy in Action, George Washington University — Campaign overview covering the January 26, 1992 60 Minutes interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
https://p1992.us/clinton/clintonoverview.html

Wikipedia — “Stand by Your Man” and “Tammy Wynette” — Release dates, chart positions, awards, covers and answer songs, and Wynette’s early life, marriages, and 1992 letter to Clinton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_by_Your_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammy_Wynette

Frequently Asked Questions