Tammy Wynette (May 5, 1942 – April 6, 1998) was an American country music singer-songwriter and one of country music's best-known artists and biggest-selling female singers.
Like her country sisters, Wynette grew up in a hardscrabble, rural household in the South, but she had big-city dreams. Born Virginia Wynette Pugh, in Itawamba County, Mississippi, she was raised by her cotton-farming grandparents. Her father, William Hollice Pugh, died of a brain tumour when she was less than a year old; he left her a recording of himself and a musical legacy, as he had attempted to be a professional singer rather than a sharecropper. Her mother, Mildred, left for Memphis to work in a defence plant during World War II.
Wynette worked in the cotton fields, played her father’s inherited instruments, took music lessons, and followed the careers of many gospel quartets who travelled through Mississippi and Alabama during the southern gospel explosion of the late 1940s and early 1950s. She was one of a trio of friends—“Wynette, Linda, and Imogene”—who performed on a local gospel radio show.
That year she walked into the office of producer-songwriter Billy Sherrill, of Epic Records, to pitch some songs. Two weeks later her name was changed to Tammy Wynette, and she was recording for Epic, with Sherrill, who would write many of her songs. Wynette’s first recording, the Johnny Paycheck–Bobby Austin composition
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“Apartment #9,” earned decent airplay but did not ignite as a hit. But her next release, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” (1967), in which she sang of a woman who was going to join her man in his own philandering game, reached the Top Ten.
“Apartment #9,” earned decent airplay but did not ignite as a hit. But her next release, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad” (1967), in which she sang of a woman who was going to join her man in his own philandering game, reached the Top Ten. Her first #1, a duet with David Houston, soon followed, and her first solo #1, “I Don’t Wanna Play House” (1967), won her a Grammy. Her classic “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” followed in 1968, as Wynette continued to explore the complicated feelings of women and children faced with the breakup of a family, a theme important personally and musically throughout her career.
Wynette’s marriage to singer-songwriter Don Chapel in 1967 was beset by professional jealousy. In 1968, country superstar George Jones witnessed a fight between the Chapels, and at Jones’s urging, Wynette and her daughters drove away with him. Wynette and Jones married February 16, 1969, and Wynette’s fourth daughter,
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Georgette, was born in 1970. Jones and Wynette nicknamed the “President and First Lady” of country music, recorded a string of hit duets that seemed drawn directly from their volatile relationship, which resulted in their divorcing in 1975.
Georgette, was born in 1970. Jones and Wynette nicknamed the “President and First Lady” of country music, recorded a string of hit duets that seemed drawn directly from their volatile relationship, which resulted in their divorcing in 1975. 
By the end of the 1980s Wynette had scored twenty #1 singles and sold more than thirty million records. Her surprising 1992 collaboration with British duo the KLF—which resulted in an international hit with their dance-pop number “Justified and Ancient”—capped a decade of collaboration projects that extended beyond the country field. In 1995 she joined Jones again to make the duet album One (MCA), produced by Tony Brown and Norro Wilson.
Wynette died of a blood clot at age fifty-five and was mourned by the industry and her fans during a nationally televised service, broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium on April 9, 1998. Appearing at the memorial were, among others, Randy Travis, the Oak Ridge Boys, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Wynonna, and Lorrie Morgan. Later that year Wynette won election to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
( Edited from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Encyclopedia of Country Music).