Dec 17, 2022: UDiscoverMusic: ​‘Searching’: Country Queen Kitty Wells Cuts A 1956 Favorite
The influence of Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Kitty Wells continues to reverberate around her home town of Nashville to this day. If you ask Dolly Parton just how important an influence Kitty was on her, for example, you’ll get a long and enthusiastic answer. Not for nothing did Wells become known as the Queen of Country Music.

Kitty Wells Official Website

July 16, 2012: Kitty Wells

Wells was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 — the same year it was also presented to Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Marian Anderson. She was only the third country performer — and the first female — to get the recognition, following previous country lifetime achievement award recipients Hank Williams and Roy Acuff.
Wells continued to have an active role at the Grand Ole Opry long after country radio stopped playing her music. She placed 81 records on the Billboard Country Charts from 1952 through 1979 — 35 of those reaching the Top 10. She created the vast majority as a solo artist, but she also scored hit duets with her husband, singer Johnnie Wright; her daughter, Carol Sue, and several with singers Red Foley and Webb Pierce. Wright died last year at 97.
Muriel Ellen Deason was born Aug. 30, 1919, in Nashville, one of the very few major country stars born in the country music capital. Her father, Charles Cary Deason, and uncle were country musicians and her mother, Myrtle Bell Deason, was a gospel singer. (SOURCE: LA Times)

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Ellen Muriel Deason (August 30, 1919 – July 16, 2012), known professionally as Kitty Wells, was an American country music singer. Her 1952 hit recording, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels", made her the first female country singer to top the U.S. country charts, and turned her into the first female country star. Her Top 10 hits continued until the mid-1960s, inspiring a long list of female country singers who came to prominence in the 1960s.

Wells ranks as the sixth most successful female vocalist in the history of Billboard's country charts, according to historian Joel Whitburn's book The Top 40 Country Hits, behind Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Reba McEntire, Tammy Wynette, and Tanya Tucker. In 1976, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1991, she became the third country music artist, after Roy Acuff and Hank Williams, and the eighth woman to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Wells' accomplishments earned her the nickname Queen of Country Music.

1974