Wynonna Judd was born in 1964 in Ashland, Kentucky. She Moved to California at the age of four, but came back to Kentucky at ten. "That was when I discovered music," she recalled...
"My influences - I thank God for this now - were records from the old record shops, the used bins. Bluegrass was my first influence, and the mountain harmonies, the mountain soul of Hazel and Alice, the harmonies of the family from the Delmore Brothers, the Stanley Brothers and the Louvin Brothers. And then I started listening to Bonnie Raitt. She's been one of the biggest influences of my vocal style. Instead of top 40, I was listening to big band, and I was listening to the stuff that my grandparents were going dancing to on the weekends. I was pretty eclectic."
By the time she became a teenager, Wynonna was completely wrapped up in music. "I didn't have a TV, telephone or Nintendo to occupy my time, so I had to play guitar to keep busy," she said. She moved with her mother to Franklin, TN, near Nashville, at the age of 15. Her mother encouraged her music, but she also began to worry. "It became my private world," Wynonna said. "I wanted to be in music more than anything in the whole world. Instead of worrying about me going out and drinking and driving, Mom was worried about me getting out of the house and getting a real job."
Suddenly, Wynonna was out of the house and living in a fishbowl. First there was the Judds' famous live audition, backed only by Wynonna's guitar, in the office of RCA's Joe Galante. Then their first show, playing to an audience of 10,000 as the opening act for the Statlers in 1984. The hits started and kept coming -23 of them - and awards began piling up. The Country Music Association's Horizon Award for 1984 was the first of their eight CMA awards. They won the first of four Grammy's in 1985. Album sales soared to over 11 million worldwide, including six gold, three platinum and one double platinum.
The Judds' career came to an end when Naomi retired due to chronic hepatitis contracted during her nursing career. At the age of 27, Wynonna had to face the world alone for the first time in her life, musically as well as emotionally. She signed with a new label, teamed up with a new producer, Tony Brown, found her own songs for the first time, and worked with a new studio band. She debuted as a solo singer on network TV at the American Music Awards with a performance of She Is His Only Need.
Copies of the single were overnighted to radio stations, and by the end of the next day, Wynonna Judd was an established star on country radio. The album release was treated as a major event in the music press, garnering the lead review in Rolling Stone and a rave from the New York Times, which tagged it "a faultless '90s country album." the first single went to #1, and three more followed: I Saw the Light, No One Else On Earth, and My Strongest Weakness. The natural spontaneity that Wynonna followed in choosing and recording songs, combined with her ability to sing any type of song, gives Tell Me Why a feeling of freedom, a feeling that every song gets its own special performance. It is musical perfection, and it can be summed up in one word - Wynonna.
