Tammy Wynette’s “Woman to Woman”

At the start of the 1974 single “Woman to Woman,” Tammy Wynette assumes the voice of wise, bitter experience, offering advice to an innocent, naïve woman (a friend? a sister? a daughter?) about the impending depredations of a third woman—an ineluctable temptress, a home-wrecker who’s going to seduce that naïve woman’s husband with malicious ease.

After a quiet acoustic piano intro stating a hushed melody that could pass for the commencement of a religious hymn as easily as it does for the secular revelation it immediately becomes, Wynette strolls into the song. “If you think you got your man in the palm of your hand”—pause; two piano chords; a warning—“you better listen.” She says this with immense sobriety, half singing, half speaking the words. The lesson the narrator wants to impart is that there’s a woman “out there” who is “a whole lot better looking than me and you,” and who can “do things to a man” that the naïve woman cannot even imagine.

By the second verse, it’s revealed that the naïve woman is married, and most likely younger than Tammy. Wynette tells her that while she’s sitting at home, “thinking how good you turn him on,” her husband’s “golden wedding band” is not going to prevent him from straying.

Why? Wynette, via the rich fantasy life of the song’s author, producer Billy Sherrill, notes the way the evil woman in this scenario is irresistible for the way she “bounces all over when she walks” and—turning domestic bliss into blissful ignorance—“she’s forgot more about a man than your sweet mama ever told you.”

The entire song is addressed to the second person: “I’m singing straight to you,” she says. And “you” are the sweet sap about to be made miserable unless you heed Wynette-the-narrator. In effect, the song is addressed to the listener—you are fated to be the screwed-over object of Wynette’s astringent advice.

I have been haunted by “Woman to Woman” ever since I first saw Tammy Wynette sing it on a cable-TV rerun of Hee Haw a few years ago. I’m into watching Hee Haw’s rich archive of musical performances. Much-derided as a cornpone version of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Hee Haw deserves a lot more credibility, even for its vaudeville sketches (the volcanic comic performances of Gailard Sartain merit their own essay) and especially for its musical guests, who nearly always played it straight.

On this particular episode, cohost Roy Clark comes back from a commercial and says simply, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tammy Wynette.” And then a grim-looking Wynette leaning against a prop front-porch railing. She stopped the show dead; no 1970s TV series this side of...