by Terry Barr
Was there ever a singer more lonely in this world than Tammy Wynette? Steacy Easton, in Why Tammy Wynette Matters, coined the phrase a “Tammy Wynette kind of pain (59).” It’s the kind of pain I keep thinking about when I hear Tammy’s version of “Lonely Street.”
In the early 1960s Wynette lived in the Elyton section of Birmingham, Alabama, with her two kids, more or less estranged from her husband. She sang at lounges out on the Birmingham-Bessemer Super Highway, and tended hair at the Midfield Beauty Salon, a place at an intersection halfway between where she lived and where I lived.
Going to work at night and leaving her kids—driving down a lonely avenue dotted with American-Italian restaurants, X-rated drive-in movies, and a barn where the Klan once burned crosses: I knew all of these sites, but for much of my life I didn’t know them as Tammy’s kind of places.
When she battled her loneliness, how many times did she consider driving away from these streets for good, with or without her kids?
Maybe my mother or grandmother had her hair done once by Tammy Wynette. My family often drove past the salon where she worked on our way to Shoney’s or Five Points West Shopping Center where I bought my first Beatles album, or to Kiddie Land, where, on my parents’ urging, I entered Laughter in the Dark all alone, the fake monsters much too scary for a five-year old boy.
Though Tammy was haunted by some real monsters, it’s her lonely voice that haunts me. Out of all the country singers I remember from Country Boy Eddie’s early morning wake-up show to Saturday afternoon country music TV, it’s Tammy—her voice and striking blond hair—that I remember best. Her “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” scared me—it backgrounded my parents’ own arguing and contributed to my loneliness and fear of being left alone.
I don’t know when I first heard Tammy’s “Lonely Street,” but when I heard it again recently after all these years, I thought of that stretch of highway we had in common. A place, for a while, that we both called home.
She knows what she’s singing about, even though a man—either Carl Below or Wynn Stewart depending on your source—wrote the song in 1956, the year I was born. And so our connection runs true and would even if I hadn’t ridden by that beauty salon in Midfield so many times. Even if I had known she was working there, I was just a little boy. What could I have done about any of it?
Her loneliness, and mine.
“There’s a place called lonely street,
Where broken dreams and memories meet.”
It’s not a hard place to get to.
***
The turnoffs to lonely streets can loom in front of you even when the highways are well-lit and full of traffic, even when you’re married and all of your precious children are riding comfortably by your side.
It’s been fifty years since Tammy worked at that salon, thirty since she passed from this world. Today, that route is almost empty of traffic, and the two country radio stations nearby that used to play her songs and that she might have visited are gone.
After my mother died, my wife and I drove down that old super-highway to the Home Depot in Midfield to buy moving boxes for transporting all my mother’s precious heirlooms. Nothing about that intersection felt familiar to me. No more Shoney’s, no more Kiddie Land, only a cut-rate grocer’s and a “Citi-Trends.”
I couldn’t even see exactly where Tammy’s beauty salon once was.
It was as if she and I had never existed.
It was at that moment, staring down that broken street, that I felt the sharpest pain.
It was a Tammy Wynette kind of place. As lonely as her finest American song.
Terry Barr writes about music and culture at medium.com/@terrybarr. His latest essay collection, The American Crisis Playlist (2020-2021), was published by Redhawk Publications, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on a book about Religion and SEC Football. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family, and teaches literature and Creative Writing at Presbyterian College.
January House Literary Journal 
Leave a comment