Aurelia Butler

Hear her biggest hits, deeper cuts and tributes from disciples.Tammy Wynette onstage in Central Park in 1977.Associated PressDear listeners,For years, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to write about one of my favorite country singers, the great, oft-misunderstood Tammy Wynette.Throughout this year, Wynette has been materializing in pop culture in all sorts of unexpected ways. First, Jessica Chastain played her — garnering an Emmy nomination — in the Showtime limited series “George & Tammy.” In May, the critic Steacy Easton published a rousing little book called “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” arguing that Wynette deserves — but has not received — as much modern recognition as her peers Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. And earlier this month, Lana Del Rey made headlines when she performed a slyly reverent cover of “Stand by Your Man” at an Arkansas concert.At last! I thought, cracking my knuckles. It’s time.Del Rey’s cover was truly the connection I’d been waiting for. I’ve been thinking for a while about the shared sensibility between Wynette and the millennial-era obsession with “sad girl music,” a sometimes glorified, sometimes bemoaned label affixed to art that finds a deep pathos in the performance of femininity. As I wrote in a piece published earlier on Friday, perhaps this is a newly illuminating context in which to consider Wynette — and an opportunity to take her more seriously.The first time I can remember hearing Wynette’s name was in the media brouhaha that resulted from Hillary Clinton denigrating her in a 1992 interview, responding to rumors of the soon-to-be-president’s infidelity: “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she said. Wynette was rightly offended, and Clinton apologized, but the damage had been done. As a young girl not really understanding all of this but internalizing it anyway, I developed a dim idea that Wynette was controversial.When I got older and started listening to her music, though, I found that she was something so much richer and more complex. I came to hear in her voice an unapologetic sense of anguish, disappointment and sometimes even defiance in the face of heartbreak. I heard a performer with a keen sense of tonal calibration and intuitive emotional intelligence — a great storyteller, and a much needed chronicler of often dismissed tales of feminized pain.Today’s playlist is a celebration of Wynette in all her multifaceted glory. It works well as a companion piece to my article, but it can also be a stand-alone introduction (or reintroduction) to her music. It features a lot of her own biggest hits, but also some tributes from disciples like Reba McEntire, Kellie Pickler and even Del Rey herself. I decided not to include any of Wynette’s many duets with her ex-husband George Jones, not because I don’t love most of them (I do), but because Wynette is so often reduced to her relationship with Jones and I wanted to give her music a chance to stand on its own. It does, however, feature a collaboration with her artistic equals and fellow Honky Tonk Angels, Parton and Lynn. May this playlist inspire singalongs, cry-alongs and good girls to go bad.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Tammy Wynette: “Womanhood”This later hit from the 1978 album “Womanhood” is one of Wynette’s strangest singles and — perhaps not coincidentally — one of my favorites. Here, Wynette embodies a character who has been led into temptation: “I am a Christian, Lord, but I’m a woman too,” she sings amid blustery guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a late ’70s Fleetwood Mac record. “If you are listening, Lord, please show me what to do.” “Womanhood” was penned by the prolific Nashville songwriter Bobby Braddock, and in his memoir he described the song as being “about a girl having a tearful talk with God about losing her virginity.” That Wynette was a woman of 36 embarking upon her fifth marriage when she recorded the song — which would become her final Top 5 hit on the country charts — adds another layer of complexity, pathos and even kitsch. (Listen on YouTube)2. Tammy Wynette: “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”Long before Rihanna went bad, there was Tammy. As with many of Wynette’s signature tunes, there is a sense of resignation and even self-abnegation at work here: “I’ll change if it takes that to make you happy,” she tells a whiskey-swilling, bar-dwelling husband as she offers to adopt a lifestyle more like his on this swinging, upbeat number from her 1967 debut. But I also hear a playful defiance in Wynette’s vocal here: She’s throwing a man’s questionable behavior back in his face and subtly pointing out a double standard in the expectations of how men and women are supposed to act. Plus, for once, it sounds like she’s having a blast. (Listen on YouTube)3. Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn: “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”In 1993, the pioneering country queens Parton and Lynn teamed up with Wynette for a spirited collaborative album called “Honky Tonk Angels,” named after Kitty Wells’s classic 1952 anthem. Since most of Wynette’s best-known collaborations find her working through heartache with Jones, it’s refreshing to hear her singing with this accomplished (and convincingly hell-raising) group of women. For the love of big hair and shoulder pads, stop what you’re doing and watch this video of them performing it live together. (Listen on YouTube)4. Kellie Pickler: “Where’s Tammy Wynette”“How ’bout a honky-tonk angel to tell me how this whole thing works,” Pickler sings on this saucy but sincerely sweet track from her 2011 album, “100 Proof,” bridging the gap between Wynette and another generation of female country stars. “Where’s Tammy Wynette when you need her?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Tammy Wynette: “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”Not only is this song — which hit No. 1 on the country charts in 1968 and earned Wynette her second Grammy nomination — a quintessential showcase of her ability to draw rich melancholy out of a lyric, it’s also a perfect example of Billy Sherrill’s signature, Wall-of-Sound-on-Music-Row style of production. C-L-A-S-S-I-C. (Listen on YouTube)6. Tammy Wynette: “Apartment #9”Wynette’s first proper Nashville recording, and her first of many collaborations with Sherrill, wasn’t a runaway hit when it was first released in 1966, but it’s since become one of her most beloved performances. “Just follow the stairway to this lonely world of mine,” she sings, as the atmosphere is heightened by a weeping pedal steel guitar. Easton, in “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” calls this one “still the saddest country song ever sung.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Reba McEntire: “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain”“This is more than a little smile I’m having to fake,” Reba McEntire sings on this 2019 ballad, released a few years after her divorce from her husband of more than two decades. McEntire brings a grown woman’s grit and a lived-through-it wisdom to this song, which both talks back to Wynette’s music in its own words (“Standing by your man is a broken plan/When he breaks your heart and all your trust with his two cheating hands”) and calls upon her as a kind of patron saint of heartbreak. (Listen on YouTube)8. Tammy Wynette: “’Til I Can Make It on My Own”Wynette co-wrote this 1976 hit, one of her greatest torch songs, with Sherrill and her soon-to-be fifth husband, the country songwriter George Richey. Of all her hits, Wynette liked to say that this one — covered later by Kenny Rogers and Dottie West, and, much later, by Martina McBride — meant the most to her. (Listen on YouTube)9. Tammy Wynette: “I Don’t Wanna Play House”This heart-wrenching 1967 breakout hit — Wynette’s first country No. 1 as a solo artist, and the performance that earned her first Grammy — is about a mother watching her young daughter playing with a neighborhood boy and overhearing her say something devastating: “I’ve watched Mommy and Daddy, and if that’s the way it’s done/I don’t wanna play house, it makes my Mommy cry. ” The song hits on plenty of the themes that would soon become Wynette’s bread and butter (broken families; lonely women; divorce’s impact on children) and a sudden, thrilling shift into her higher vocal register in the middle of a verse when she sings, “And then the teardrops made my eyes go dim.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Lana Del Rey featuring Nikki Lane: “Breaking Up Slowly”Del Rey first hinted at her affinity for Wynette on this duet with the alt-country crooner Nikki Lane, from Del Rey’s 2021 album “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” “I don’t wanna live with a life of regret,” Lane sings in the second verse. “I don’t wanna end up like Tammy Wynette.” Del Rey, though, takes a more sympathetic view in her verses, on which she seems to be singing from Wynette’s own perspective: “George got arrested out on the lawn/We might be breaking up after this song.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Tammy Wynette: “Stand by Your Man”Often imitated but never duplicated, Wynette’s biggest pop hit and most infamous calling card has a stealthy power. Sherrill’s production here is top-notch, and Wynette’s undulating vocal — which seems to swing between private pain and public restraint — is a force of tragic but strangely regal beauty. As Easton writes, “‘Stand by Your Man’ is enough of a porous text that it leaks and stains everything it touches, but its messiness is one of the reasons it’s so important.” (Listen on YouTube)I’ll even learn to like the taste of whiskey,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Where’s Tammy Wynette When You Need Her?” track listTrack 1: Tammy Wynette, “Womanhood”Track 2: Tammy Wynette, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”Track 3: Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”Track 4: Kellie Pickler, “Where’s Tammy Wynette”Track 5: Tammy Wynette, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”Track 6: Tammy Wynette, “Apartment #9”Track 7: Reba McEntire, “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain”Track 8: Tammy Wynette, “’Til I Can Make It on My Own”Track 9: Tammy Wynette, “I Don’t Wanna Play House”Track 10: Lana Del Rey featuring Nikki Lane, “Breaking Up Slowly”Track 11: Tammy Wynette, “Stand by Your Man”Bonus tracksOK, one more: Tammy’s bonkers 1991 collaboration with the KLF, “Justified & Ancient.” I will always stand by the jams.And if it’s new songs you’re looking for, we’ve got a whopping 13 to recommend on this week’s Playlist, including tracks from Nicki Minaj, Oneohtrix Point Never and a brash Doja Cat single that I am very much digging. Listen here. More

Hear tracks by Peter Gabriel, Lauren Mayberry, Oneohtrix Point Never and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Doja Cat, ‘Demons’A brash, blown-speaker quality animates “Demons,” the latest single from Doja Cat’s upcoming album, “Scarlet.” “How my demons look now that my pockets full?” she shouts with a defiant rasp, before switching to a lighter and more viciously humorous register on the verses. (“Who are you, and what are those? You are gross!”) “Demons” also features a horror movie-inspired video, which stars Christina Ricci and features a very creepy Doja slithering around like a red-eyed monster. Other pop stars merely tune out their haters; Doja exorcises them. LINDSAY ZOLADZNicki Minaj, ‘Last Time I Saw You’Nicki Minaj doesn’t usually admit to any regrets or second thoughts. But she does in “Last Time I Saw You,” a song that seesaws between guitar-flecked ballad and rueful rapping. “I wish I remembered to say I’d do anything for you/Maybe I pushed you away because I thought that I’d bore you,” she sings, confessing that she was the one in the wrong. JON PARELESTeezo Touchdown featuring Janelle Monáe, ‘You Thought’Misjudgments pile up in “You Thought,” which transforms from percussive, triplet-driven rock to ballad with brisk hip-hop wordplay. Teezo Touchdown moves between rapping and singing; Monáe is melodic, singing, “I thought we were better.” The song details a breakup from both sides: missed opportunities, misunderstandings, unfulfilled needs, all compressed into pop. PARELESBlankfor.ms, Jason Moran and Marcus Gilmore, ‘Eighth Pose’Tyler Gilmore — the New York-based composer and musician known as Blankfor.ms — makes music using degraded tape loops, analog synthesizers and an old spinet piano. He was approached recently by the producer Sun Chung about doing an album with jazz improvisers, and his first call was to the pianist and composer Jason Moran, his former teacher at the New England Conservatory. His second was to the drummer Marcus Gilmore. Those two are among the finest improvisers alive: It is an impressive team for a first foray. On “Refract,” their new album, the trio works across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops by Blankfor.ms sparking improvisations from his collaborators. “Eighth Pose” turns on a twitchy, coiled synth phrase, like a keyed-up Aphex Twin track; Moran picks it up on the piano, toying with it, while Gilmore adds a nervy drumbeat, passed through compressed effects. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKenya Grace, ‘Strangers’Speedy breakbeats equate with dating jitters in “Strangers,” Kenya Grace’s whispery complaint about how 21st-century romance too often ends in ghosting. She’s the singer, songwriter and producer on the track. “One random night when everything changes/you won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers.” Synthesizers hum as the percussion races ahead, while she sings about feeling like “Everyone’s disposable.” PARELESJeff Rosenstock, ‘Will U Still U’The Long Island-born punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock tests the limits of love on “Will U Still U,” the jet-propelled opening track off his new album “Hellmode.” “Will you still love me” after I’ve messed up, he asks (with an expletive) in a catchy, incongruously cheery melody, before unleashing a rapid-fire rundown of his relationship worries. In the song’s cathartic finale he’s joined by a chorus of voices shouting that refrain at the top of their lungs and fist-pumping in anxious solidarity. ZOLADZOneohtrix Point Never, ‘A Barely Lit Path’Oneohtrix Point Never is the composer and mastermind Daniel Lopatin, who has been the Weeknd’s producer and created the nervy soundtrack for “Uncut Gems,” along with making his own albums. “A Barely Lit Path” begins as a reverent, electronics-edged dirge with processed vocals imagining “a barely lit path from your house to mine.” Then it goes through a multiverse of wordless transformations: pulsing synthesizers, a stately quasi-Baroque string orchestra, a choir accompanied by synthesizer arpeggios and a gradual, virtual decrescendo. Absolutely anything can happen as long as it’s in the same key. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘Love Can Heal (Bright-Side Mix)’An expansive sound design — with bell-toned ostinatos, throaty cellos and multidirectional echoes — underlines Peter Gabriel’s troubled but determined optimism in “Love Can Heal,” a new track from his gradually accruing album “I/O.” His vocal sets aside his usual grizzled hoarseness for a modest tenor; a choir joins him, yet the song stays fragile. PARELESJason Hawk Harris, ‘Jordan and the Nile’There’s an Appalachian feeling to the melody of Jason Hawk Harris’s rootsy incantation “Jordan and the Nile,” a leisurely, mystical song about rivers and generations. An organ and a string section provide droning chords as he sings about determined optimism informed by biblical imagery: “I’m feeling heavy but I see the light/A world is dark but my abyss is bright,” he promises. PARELESLauren Mayberry, ‘Are You Awake?’The debut solo single from Lauren Mayberry — the lead singer of the Scottish electro-pop group Chvrches — is a sparse, plaintive piano ballad written with Tobias Jesso Jr., chronicling nocturnal anxieties and open-ended questions. “Are you awake? I feel a sadness in my skin,” Mayberry sings, her voice melancholy but chiming with the faintest hint of hope that her message will be answered. ZOLADZMaria BC, ‘Amber’ and ‘Watcher’Glimmering electronics, tolling guitars and hovering vocal harmonies gather in “Amber” and “Watcher,” two segued songs that meditate on closeness: “Your scent is on me now/Your senses draw me out,” Maria BC sings. “There is no place to hide and no wrong.” It’s blissfully enveloping and humbly awe-struck. PARELESKris Davis, ‘Dolores’ (Take 1)“Dolores” is easily one of the most infectious melodies Wayne Shorter wrote during his stint as musical director for the Miles Davis Quintet. But it’s not one of the (many) Shorter tunes you’re likely to hear called at a jam session or covered at a straight-ahead gig. Maybe there is something intimidating about the balled up, stop-and-start melody; the centerlessness of its structure; or how perfectly the quintet plays it on the classic 1966 recording. Well, none of this scares the pianist and composer Kris Davis. Strong-but-bendable rhythm, splintered melodic lines and rough-and-tumble interplay are par for the course for (this) Davis, especially with her Diatom Ribbons project. On a new album, recorded live at the Village Vanguard with a five-member version of that ensemble, the group takes its time getting to the theme: The bassist Trevor Dunn makes some references to it, the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington establishes a heavy groove, and finally Julian Lage’s guitar comes together with Davis’s piano to grapple with the melody. When Lage departs from it on his solo, he travels far — and the band comes with him. RUSSONELLO More

Understated and unarrogant, Ax can be taken for granted. But he has long been, and continues to be, one of the finest American pianists.“A young pianist with the hard-to-forget name of Emanuel Ax has one thing going for him before he plays a note,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1973. “But brand identification, as advertising men term it, helps in the long run only if the product delivers, and Mr. Ax’s recital at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night fortunately carried the stamp of quality.”The occasion was Ax’s New York debut, and it was the opening flourish of a banner few years. At the Marlboro Festival in Vermont that summer, Ax gave his first concert with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist he has spent his career playing and quipping with, the friend who calls him “the big brother I never had.” Soon, there was a date on the Young Concert Artists series, a Carnegie Hall appearance, a victory in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and, in February 1975, an eloquent first recording.That stamp of quality had become indelible, and it has since endured. Of course, Ax, 74, protests that the half-century career he has enjoyed following that inaugural hometown bow has been largely the product of good fortune. Never mind his Avery Fisher Prize or his 19 Grammy nominations (and eight wins), his long list of premieres or his generosity and ease as a chamber music partner to Ma and other eager collaborators. Even now, Ax will only reluctantly allow that he has much talent at all.“I just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,” Ax said of playing the piano during a recent interview at Tanglewood, where he was joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Brahms concerto as he has many, many times before. “I think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.”From left, Leonidas Kavakos, Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, who as a trio have been working their way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Hilary ScottThat’s Manny, as everyone calls him. He has said things like this forever, sought to share the spotlight or point it wholly elsewhere. And his modesty, which he wraps in a jesting smile and a famous bonhomie, is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike.“Whatever his musical decisions are, they are never ones that would draw attention to himself,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has known Ax for four decades and will premiere a piano concerto by Anders Hillborg with him and the San Francisco Symphony in October. “So in the very, very best sense of the word, he kind of eradicates himself out of the picture.”Might that mean, though, that Ax is taken for granted? After all, how many artists have performed at his level for so long? How many have treated us so reliably to such taste and good sense as he? How many have had his ability, not unlike that of his late associate Bernard Haitink, to make music sound so simply right?Ax ranks among the very finest of American pianists. Yet he would never admit it. As Ma put it, “He doesn’t go around saying, ‘And I did this.’” In fact, Ma recalled, when Ax told him that this article was happening, he said, “I don’t know why they’re doing this.”“I told him it’s because he’s old,” Ma said, bursting into laughter.Ma, left, and Ax in 1989.PhotofestMa — who, aside from the pianist Yoko Nozaki, Ax’s wife since 1974, has probably heard him play more than anyone — has a theory about why Ax is the way he is. “One thing that I can safely say, over the 50 years I’ve known him, is that he operates by a very strict code of conduct,” he said.The code, Ma went on, means that Ax never speaks ill of other pianists, and does what he can to bolster them instead. He insists on being kind, on looking at the brighter side of things. He goes to unusual lengths to build trust with fellow performers because the music, in the end, depends on it.“Somewhere along the line, he saw some things that he didn’t like, and he decided that he was not going to be that,” Ma explained. “He’s seen the consequences, and that’s why the code of conduct exists. It’s not some arbitrary thing.”AX WAS BORN in the Soviet Union in 1949, in what is now Lviv, Ukraine — though he still calls it Lwów, the Polish name it held in the interwar years. During the Holocaust, his parents, Joachim and Hellen, survived the concentration camps but lost, he said, “everybody.” They wed after the war and left for Warsaw when Ax was 7. He didn’t return to Lviv until six years ago, when he visited at the invitation of Philippe Sands, whose book “East West Street” movingly recounts the history of that contested city.Ax as a boy.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx with his parents, who left the Soviet Union and eventually settled in the United States.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx said that he only really remembered the opera house where he had first heard music, but Ma has heard him talk about a darker recollection, too: “I think he remembers a big parade in the town, and he knew the exact spot where it was. He backtracked and realized that that must have been when Stalin had died.”Warsaw led to Winnipeg, and Winnipeg to Manhattan, where the family settled into an apartment on the roof of a building across the street from Carnegie Hall. Ax was 12, and the hall, where he will play works by Beethoven and Schoenberg in April, became his playground. “I haunted the place,” he said.Great pianists crossed his path, older ones like Artur Rubinstein and younger artists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he speaks of them with the excitement of a fan and the insight of a colleague. For Emil Gilels, he reserves telling enthusiasm.“I think he’s in a way the most sane pianist,” Ax said. “It’s so direct, absolutely self-confident, unarrogant, logical, beautiful, and just done just right. You walk out and you say, ‘That’s the way it should be.’ Of course, then you hear Richter, and you say, ‘No, that’s the way it should be.’ And then you hear Horowitz.”Ax studied at Juilliard with Mieczyslaw Munz, and endured several competitions before he triumphed in the Rubinstein. Even then, his virtues were not those typical of winners. For all his “dream technique,” as a critic described it in 1975, he immediately seemed a deeper musician than most. “His interpretations are warm, solid and straightforward,” Tim Page wrote in The Times in 1985, styling him as “a deeply satisfying pianist” — traits you can hear on his recording of the Chopin “Ballades” from the same year, or his later Haydn and Brahms.Ax performing with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011; the two will be reunited when they premiere a new concerto with the San Francisco Symphony in October.Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesIf consistency has been Ax’s hallmark, he has never been entirely reducible to type. He dabbled with period instruments for a while, joining Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to record the Chopin concertos with brilliance and verve; his dedication to new music, which has seen him premiere scores by composers including John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, has been striking for a pianist of his stature.“I don’t think he sees it as a duty,” Salonen said of Ax’s commitment to contemporary works. “I think he thinks it’s normal. He thinks this is something that musicians do.”Chamber music, though, was with Ax from the start. He studied with the legendary tutor Felix Galimir as a teenager, then went on to form, among other groups, his duo with Ma, a piano trio with Ma and Isaac Stern, a piano quartet with the addition of Jaime Laredo, and, most recently, another trio with Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, with whom he is working his way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Ax’s fundamental approach to chamber music reflects his “devotion to where he landed, and to the aspirations of the system,” Ma said, to “the idea of republicanism, that you can be not hierarchical.” Their relationship was forged on jokes told in the Juilliard cafeteria, where they met when Ma was 15 and Ax was 21, but also on an ideal of equality in shared music, Ma said; this, at a time when pianists were still billed as accompanists to stars, or spoken of in the possessive sense.And it is chamber music, or more precisely playing with friends, that keeps Ax from retiring. He thinks about it more than he used to, he said; he missed giving concerts during the pandemic, but he also felt liberated from the deep anxiety that has always come with them.Ax in 1973.Christian Steiner/YCA“I get very nervous when I play, and I really wish I could get over it,” Ax said, confiding that the feeling can be worse now than before. “It’s not even a musical worry, it’s more about getting things right, you know — wrong notes and things like that.”Ax is modest even about these strains; Ma compared the pressure that Ax has always felt to that suffered by Martha Argerich, whose stage fright and perfectionism have led her largely to abandon solo recitals. But he suspects that Ax is not there yet.“Something in me tells me that he’s not going to stop, because performing also does something for him that is a pillar in his life,” Ma said. “It’s solidifying. I wouldn’t say that it’s like he needs it, but there’s a mutuality that’s good.”Ask Ma what makes Ax special as a pianist, and he will say that it is how he gives music the sense that everything has been thought through. He will note how revealing it is that Ax so adores Brahms, whose works are all about restraint, about reaching for things that are kept out of reach. He will marvel, with more than a hint of exasperation, that Ax still practices for four hours a day, that he is still so prone to doubt; he will grant, though, that doubt serves a purpose in Ax’s life.“He experiences that — he lets himself experience that — because he doesn’t want to say, ‘I know everything,’” Ma said.But Ma will say all this only when asked to elaborate. Otherwise, when he answers the question of what defines Ax as a pianist, he responds with just one word.“Musicianship.”Ax, left, with students from Kids 4 Harmony at Tanglewood.Hilary Scott More

The unsung godmother of so-called “sad girl” music — and one of pop’s most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain — has long been misunderstood.Earlier this month, at a concert in Arkansas, Lana Del Rey covered a song she’d never played live before: Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”The performance made headlines, even if most of the accompanying articles held “Stand by Your Man” — an exhaustively debated cultural Rorschach test about badly behaved men and the women who put up with them — and Wynette herself at arm’s length.People magazine called the original song “polarizing.” The website Stereogum referred to Wynette’s track as “controversial.” Rolling Stone noted that Del Rey “didn’t introduce the song or offer commentary on her intentions,” as if simply paying tribute to Wynette couldn’t have been enough of an intention. That article referred to Wynette’s 1968 hit as “a tune many considered an affront to the feminist movement of the late ’60s,” then linked to the publication’s recently revised list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, on which “Stand by Your Man” ranked No. 473.It was just another Rorschach test: Even 25 years after her death, nobody knows quite what to make of Tammy Wynette.Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942, Wynette had a resonantly sad voice and a life story to match. Married at 17; divorced with three children by 23; in and out of disappointing and sometimes abusive relationships (most famously with her frequent duet partner, George Jones); a sufferer of chronic health problems and bizarre, unexplained acts of violence; gone too soon when she died in her sleep in 1998, at age 55.She was also, perhaps because of these experiences, one of the most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain that popular music has ever known.Wynette and George Jones onstage in 1980 in Chicago. The couple’s tumultuous relationship was chronicled in the recent series “George & Tammy.”Kirk West/Getty ImagesIn recent years, Dolly Parton has been canonized into an untouchable pop-cultural saint, and Loretta Lynn, rightly remembered as a feisty country pioneer when she died last year at 90, enjoyed a late-career renaissance collaborating with younger rock and alt-country artists. But Wynette’s legacy has become more complicated, perhaps because her tumultuous life and storied career have too often been conflated with the flattest and most literal reading of her signature song.Notoriously, when rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelity surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton told a reporter, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” But was that ever what Wynette was actually advocating? (For one thing, Wynette was also known for singing one of the most famous songs about divorce.) A recent prestige-TV series and an incisive new book of music criticism offer their own answers, and varied ways to think about Wynette in a modern context.Late last year, Showtime aired the long-gestating “George & Tammy,” in which Jessica Chastain gives a steely, fearless performance as Wynette. (Her work earned an Emmy nomination, and she’s currently the betting favorite to win.) With Michael Shannon playing a convincingly unhinged, charismatic and ultimately contrite Jones, the series encompasses the six years of the couple’s troubled marriage and decades of their closely entwined careers.Jessica Chastain as Wynette and Michael Shannon as Jones in “George & Tammy.”Dana Hawley/Showtime, via Associated PressAs strong as the lead performances are, the series suffers from small anachronisms and fictitious dramatizations — no, Wynette was not in the studio when Jones finally nailed the vocal take of his heartbreaking late-career weepie “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” at least not physically — and it too often scripts Wynette reciting retrofitted platitudes that overexplain the era’s obvious sexism. (“If a girl singer got drunk like you boys do, they would toss her out of Nashville so fast,” she says to Jones, who is eating a raw potato in an attempt to alleviate a hangover.) But “George & Tammy” is most obviously marred by its answer to the classic music biopic conundrum: to lip-sync (and risk looking unserious) or to sing (and inevitably fall short of the source material)?Chastain tackles the songs herself, and though her pipes are decent, her performances never quite transcend honky-tonk bar karaoke. Watching the series, you miss the specific and elusive magic of Wynette’s own voice, making clear how easy it is to take for granted. As with the many lackluster and overly literal covers of “Stand by Your Man” that have been recorded over the years, the power of Wynette’s vocals and the emotional intelligence of her interpretations are somehow easier to appreciate in absentia.And what a voice it was: emotionally weighty but swooping and nimble, downright kaleidoscopic in its melancholy. “The thing about Wynette’s voice,” writes the critic Steacy Easton in a slim but thoughtful new book, “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” “is that, often, how it catches and breaks, even how it twangs, are marks of domestic melodrama in her performance.”In prose that occasionally veers toward the academic but mostly stays succinctly readable, Easton effectively makes the case that Wynette is underappreciated and worthy of a serious critical reappraisal. The musician has long had a few strikes working against her. As Clinton’s curt 1992 dismissal attests, the women Wynette sang about and embodied in her songs often seemed at odds with second-wave feminism. She often sang about the sorts of people and situations that aren’t usually championed in a culture that devalues women’s work and doesn’t treat their perspectives seriously. Easton notes, astutely, that Wynette’s songs often depicted “failures of the domestic,” and that “Wynette’s best work is about when the most private failures become public scandals.”That intuitive toggling between the private and the public gets at why Wynette’s is one of the saddest voices ever put to tape. Its sadness comes not from rawness or feral inhibition, but from the constant, self-conscious mediation between how the singer is feeling and how she must present herself to the world.It’s that brimming-but-never-spilling-over quality that so many women, mothers and queer people have learned to use as a survival strategy. (Easton, who is trans and nonbinary, provides a refreshing perspective on Wynette and gender: “The idea of putting on your womanhood has a tender resonance,” they write.) It’s knowing exactly how to fold a napkin to dab your mascara so no one knows you’ve been crying. Or, as Reba McEntire sings in an affecting 2019 ballad called “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain,” it’s when “you don’t want him to see you crying, so you’re crying in the rain.” It’s also, in some cases, about the sacrifice of swallowing that pain to protect a child’s feelings — about spelling out “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” rather than explaining what it means.Despite her cultural association with standing by her man, Wynette actually divorced four times. In Ken Burns’s 2019 documentary “Country Music,” the singer-songwriter Jeannie Seely notes the irony that while Lynn’s songs often embodied the persona of the feisty woman ready to kick her man to the curb, she was the one who stood by her man for his entire life. Seely mused, of Wynette and Lynn, “I always kind of thought they wrote each other’s songs.”Wynette on her tour bus in 1971. Al Clayton/Getty ImagesOnstage in Arkansas, a state abutting Wynette’s own Mississippi birthplace, Del Rey put her into yet another modern context — perhaps one that made the most sense yet. I’ve often considered Wynette to be an unrecognized godmother of so-called “sad girl” music, that somewhat nebulous aesthetic that initially flourished on the microblogging website Tumblr, and of which Del Rey has become an unofficial icon. While there’s something explicitly womanly about Wynette’s sadness — “this ain’t no little girl heartache,” McEntire sings in her definition of “Tammy Wynette pain” — Del Rey’s cover brings Wynette’s music to a generation and a type of listener less inclined to dismiss the expression of feminine pain as weakness. As the critic and artist Audrey Wollen once said of her playfully defined “Sad Girl Theory,” “there is an entire lineage of women who consciously disrupted the status quo through enacting their own sorrow.” Which sounds like yet another way of talking about that Tammy Wynette kind of pain.That type of subversion pervades Wynette’s exquisite and deeply felt performance of “Stand by Your Man,” too — a performance that no one has come close to topping. The Chicks play it too perky; Lyle Lovett’s version is winkingly smarmy; Carla Bruni’s cover … well … exists. Del Rey, though, seems to understand something about the song’s tension and dynamism, its paradoxical earnest irony. But even an eerie A.I. recording speculating what it might sound like if “Del Rey” recorded a “studio version” of “Stand by Your Man” can’t quite fathom the song’s murky depths as well as Wynette could. Again, the voice you miss is distinctly hers.Maybe I am able to come to it with less baggage than I may have had I lived through the particular culture war it spawned in 1968, but I do not listen to this song — or, for that matter, Wynette’s devastating 1967 breakout hit “I Don’t Want to Play House” — and hear a ringing endorsement of heterosexual monogamy, female submission and male supremacy. I hear a quavering teardrop of a voice acknowledge and sing like she means it, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” And then I hear her issuing one of the most zinging backhanded compliments in the history of patriarchy: “If you love him, oh be proud of him/’cause after all, he’s just a man.” More