BY GAVIN McNETT | Tammy Wynette, one of the eminences of the old-school Nashville scene, died on Monday. Although the cause of death was reported to be a blood clot in her lungs, the result of an unspecified illness, in truth her health was bad for years (she underwent more than 35 operations in recent years).

But Wynette rode a steep roller coaster in health as well as in illness. Her marriage to George Jones, in 1969, was everything you'd expect from a marriage to someone even Johnny Cash was counseled to avoid. Her other four marriages, while less spectacularly bellicose and liquor-fueled, were by reports similar in character. In 1978, Wynette was abducted and beaten by a masked assailant -- the identity of whom was never determined, but who Wynette mysteriously claimed "later served jail time for something else." In 1988, she filed for bankruptcy, citing bad investments. Four years after that, she had the biggest hit of her career, potboiling in a dignified, but somewhat bewildered, fashion on British rave-rock outfit KLF's dance smash, "Justified and Ancient."

These things alone -- and I say this without a trace of irony, and even with a touch of awe -- would guarantee her a throne of honor in the country pantheon. Tammy was Old Nashville to the sinews: as much prey to its horrors as heir to its treasures, and great for her achievements in both regards. Her records, fine as they are for a blue, lonely Friday evening or as a chaser to a round of Patsy Cline, are a wilted bouquet next to what she represents as an artist, and as a woman of her circumstances.

Wynette rose to stardom through determination and talent alone, beginning her career with nothing but a great voice and a self-made Jackie-O bouffant, and leaving it upon a pyre of squander, grandeur and the wreck of her dynasty. She was the first woman in country music to sell a million copies of an album -- and she did it as part of the last generation of country stars to rise through the force of rural, not urban, principles.

She was lofted not as a shiny Nashville trinket -- not as, for instance, a harassed stage-bantam like LeAnn Rimes -- for there was no such thing in 1966. It was as a real woman of the 4-H belt that she rose, as a doyenne of the sour-beer circuit. If she sang about the heart's wandering, she had a heart with which to wander, and a small-town husband to flick off the porch light when the early sky glowed blue without her. If pain rent the timbre of her voice, it was pain reflected from a human soul into the fun-house mirrors of fame -- and of desire gilded, but unslaked -- not pain crayoned inside the lines, like your Garth Brookses, or whoever plugs the podunk jukeboxes these days.

Wynette held a cosmetology degree from some swampwater hair-curling institute; Garth Brooks holds a marketing degree from Oklahoma State. Wynette had the rural aspect, the features of a field-woman's daughter (she was one) and the impulses of a woman born to scarcity and bewildered by money and plenitude; Clint Black was grown in a vat someplace in urban Texas and rationalizes himself as a "regular guy" by the fact that his Hollywood-starlet wife still walks the dog without a valet. Dolly Parton, Wynette's '70s-generation successor, is an appalling train wreck of trashy impulses and down-home trappings who started a theme park and called it "Dollywood"; Tammy called her bright-light Disneyland "Nashville" -- and stormed its gates, conquered and died there.

If there's another Tammy Wynette left in America, she's performing tonight -- curling somebody's hair in a whistle-stop gossip salon, while the LeAnn Rimeses trail tinsel stars through the stratosphere above her.
SALON | April 8, 1998