Music
Lee Ann Climbs
Unlike another Texas country singer, Lee Ann Womack is no teenager. But she has one of the freshes – and hottest – voices in Nashville.
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Authenticity is another of her traits. She says she would never go to a Music Row restaurant wearing sweats: “It’s pretty vain, I guess.” And then there’s the drawl, which critics love most. Ask her if she’s exaggerating her East Texas twang when she says “cain’t,” and she replies, “Huh-uh, no.” So she’s not putting on? “Now, my sister has done a real good job of overcomin’ a lot of that.” Overcoming it? Yes, says her sister, Judy Cook, a Houston attorney: “People don’t tend to take you seriously if you don’t sound educated.” What’s more, Womack will hold back details rather than brag. “Lee Ann doesn’t let you know a lot,” her mother says. For instance, when asked how Mark Chesnutt came to sing on her CD, she replies that her producer “got him.” Chesnutt tells it differently: “I’m the one who brought it up,” he insists. “I said, ‘Man, I’d like to cut a duet with you.’”
Yet Womack brims with ambition. She has always imagined a bigger world for herself, even in the sixth grade back in Jacksonville. “I thought, ‘I wish I was where the people are movin’ around instead of sittin’ in a classroom,’” she recalls. “I desperately wanted to be where the action is.” If there’s aching stuff on her records, she also includes feel-good tunes; she wants hits. “Lee Ann Womack went gold,” she says, “but it better go platinum, and the new one better go double platinum.” Now that she’s won several major awards, Womack no longer wants to have to pay dues. “I don’t want to be the opening act,” she says. “I want to be the headliner.”
Which poses an interesting question. How likely is it that Womack will stay true to herself and still win enough mass appeal ever to go double platinum? Men who reach that level—like George Strait and Alan Jackson—have no problem sticking to their roots. But women rarely do so well without capitalizing on sex (Shania Twain, Mindy McCready) or selling out (Reba McEntire). Buck Owens pauses as he contemplates Womack’s rare attitude. “I used to hear it from Reba,” he says, “but she went a long ways away.”
Womack couldn’t have known, when her deejay father spun “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” that Owens himself would one day be listening to her songs on the radio. At age four she insisted that her dad, Aubrey, play her other favorites: Glen Campbell, whom she was bent on marrying, Bob Wills, and Ray Price. When the family gathered around the TV on Sundays to watch The Porter Wagoner Show, Womack imitated Dolly Parton, who advertised laundry soap that came packed with a gift towel. “She had those towels in the Breeze detergent,” she recalls. “My parents used to say, ‘Do Dolly!’ and I would mock her hawkin’ those towels, describing the color: raspberry red, huckleberry blue, lemon yellow.”
By age ten she already preferred the night life. “When the rest of us were getting ready to go to bed, she was kind of getting cranked up,” her sister, Judy, says. “We’d hear this rattling in the kitchen, and she’d be making french fries, cutting up real potatoes. She’d be up half the night doing strange things.” And she didn’t put up with much. “If she thought she was being treated unfairly by a teacher, then she just told them,” her friend Murray says. “And if she had to tell them right there in the classroom, she would.”
Womack had long spent Saturday nights listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, and when her high school guidance counselor asked her to fill out a career questionnaire in high school, she wrote down “country singer” as her future job title. “He wanted me to pick something from the chart, and then, as a hobby, I could sing at weddings,” she says. She skipped her senior trip to South Padre Island for a week’s stay in Nashville and enrolled that fall in the country music program at South Plains College in Levelland. As a singer for the school’s Country Caravan, she rode a bus across the Southwest, sang, and tore down sets.
After a year she announced that she’d had enough school: It was time to go to Nashville. “We said, ‘Okay, but we are not going to turn you loose in the town,’” recalls her mother. “‘You have to go to college, and if you’ll live in the dorm, then you may go to Nashville.’” Soon after settling in at Belmont College (now Belmont University), Womack learned that MCA Records was looking for an intern. Only juniors could apply, but she neglected to mention she was only a sophomore and got hired. Once there, she worked across the hall from legendary producer Tony Brown but never told him that she sang. “That would have embarrassed me too bad,” she says. “I was tryin’ to be real quiet about that part of it and just learn.”
Before graduating, she quit school and married Sellers, waiting tables for extra money. With the connections she made through him, Womack began to write songs, sing demos, and perform showcases around town. In 1995 one showcase got a tape of hers into the hands of an executive at Sony/ATV Tree Music, the preeminent publishing company for country songwriters, and she landed a spot with its production company. In her time there Womack co-wrote songs with old hands like “Whispering” Bill Anderson and Sam Hogin. (Womack recently co-wrote “I Don’t Remember Forgetting,” which appears on one of Ricky Skaggs’s recent bluegrass CDs.)
Her deal with Decca came through early in 1996. In the months before her record would come out, the label started grooming her for stardom. She went to industry and radio events, but she clammed up without fail. “Now, I did have about ten people in the office say, ‘Gosh, she’s awfully shy. How’s she going to handle it when the record comes out?’” remembers Decca senior vice president/general manager Shelia Shipley-Biddy. “And I said, ‘She’ll be fine.’ I’ve seen artists grow, and as their confidence grows, as they have success, these things come easier.’”
Jamie Schilling Fields wrote about country star Neal McCoy in the March 1998 issue of Texas Monthly.
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