At Tammy Wynette’s Grave, Woodlawn Memorial Park, Nashville

Drew Bratcher meditates on the legacy of a country music legend.

By Drew BratcherJanuary 4, 2026

• Music

FIRST OFF, it’s not out there in the grass with Johnny Paycheck and Marty Robbins. Miss Tammy’s tomb—the word seems wrong, not one you’ll find in any of her songs—is in the mausoleum. Through the front doors, up the stairs, third right. She’s in the carpeted hallway, past the columbarium. K. T. Oslin, the late-blooming country singer, is interred in the same wall. Lynn Anderson and Little Jimmy Dickens, two Grand Ole Opry mainstays, are a couple of alcoves over.

It doesn’t work this way, but if burial places morphed into nightclubs at sundown, this one would boast one of the finest bands in the afterlife, up there with the other Woodlawn in the Bronx (Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis), with Père Lachaise in Paris (Maria Callas, Jim Morrison, Frédéric Chopin, Edith Piaf), and with the cemetery across town my grandfather is buried in, where Lefty Frizzell, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and Don Helms, among others, moonlight forever beneath the weathered headstones.

In any bone saloon, Miss Tammy Wynette would get top billing. Onstage, as in the vocal booth, she was a powerhouse. Starting with 1967’s Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad and ending with 1994’s Without Walls, she made 33 studio records. She released another nine as a duet partner with her third husband, George Jones. She sent 20 singles to the top of the country charts. “Stand by Your Man,” her 1968 anti-anthem about resigned fidelity, went to number one in Ireland, Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands too. Few songs have soundtracked more films. It’s playing in Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei’s hotel room in My Cousin Vinny (1992). You hear it during the opening credits, as Jack Nicholson drives home from the Kern County oil fields, in Five Easy Pieces (1970).

With Tammy, it’s the voice more than any one performance that resonates. She outfitted every song she ever sang in the full-grain leather of her raspy soprano. It was a singular Southern instrument, wistful and earthy, elegant and assertive, no fake flowers here, and no real ones, either, without a trace of dust. There was an inner, intuitive drama to her sound, an existential fracas rooted in rural poverty and the early experience of her father’s death. Already twice married and a mother of three daughters by the age of 25 (the fourth came at 28), she was, from the moment she moved to East Nashville in January 1966, singing for her life.

The years she’d labored picking cotton on the Alabama-Mississippi line, where she was raised on her grandparents’ farm, and the eternity she spent despising it—the tussle between reality and desire, acceptance, refusal, and faith—is ever-present in her phrasing, in the way her voice will nearly break, go breathless for half a beat, then bend forward toward a new resolve. She was like Gena Rowlands in Laramie (1959), like Patricia Neal in Hud (1963)—tough, gorgeous, always disappointed yet never cynical, someone who knows how, who is still keen.

You can hear the influence of Tammy’s voice, if not the life experience that burnished it, all over the place. In Tanya Tucker and Faith Hill, in younger country artists such as Megan Moroney, Gabby Barrett, and Ella Langley. Miley Cyrus channels it. Would there even be a Lana Del Rey without Tammy’s dirt-rich balladeering?

A marble statue. A sandstone cenotaph. A granite slab with, say, the first line of the chorus of her 1978 single “Womanhood”—“I am a Christian, Lord, but I’m a woman too”—chiseled into the rock. That’s what you’d expect to find at Woodlawn. Instead, Tammy’s plaque is the simplest thing imaginable. There is no epitaph. In thin metal letters you can buy online for cheap, you find her name (stage name, that is—her given name was Virginia Wynette Pugh), the year of her birth (1942), and the year she died (1998).

Compared to Little Jimmy’s marker, a brushed-bronze sculpted collage of career highs and family scenes accompanied by a figurine of him playing the guitar as a kid, hers feels modest, self-effacing. Compared to the Possum’s gravesite on the lawn outside, a stone monument to his two abiding loves—heartbreak music and his fourth wife, Nancy—it seems insufficient, almost offensive, as if mistakes have been made, a hometown hero escorted to the nosebleeds, a cover model barred from the runway during fashion week.

As it happens, the current form of the crypt plate, in all its austerity, is an upgrade. Years ago, Miss Tammy’s pseudonym was not even included. Instead, the grave announced the burial site of “Virginia W. Richardson,” her married name at the time of her death. That insult, part of a legal battle over the rights to her estate, was redressed in 2014 after a public campaign by her daughters, and yet the penny-plain marker in the mausoleum remains.

Perhaps there is some blunt poetry in the puritan sparseness of Tammy’s grave. Caskets, after all, know nothing of Grammys (Tammy has two) or CMA vocalist of the year awards (she won three in a row, from 1968 to 1970). The skulls of artists, like the skulls of accountants and crooks, are made of phosphate of calcium. Mr. Bones, what do you call the most famous person in the cemetery? Deceased.

Tammy died in her sleep from heart failure. The loss hit Music City like a bolt, not on the order of Patsy Cline’s tragic death 35 years previously, but close enough. She was 55 years old. At the memorial service at the Ryman Auditorium, there was a palpable sense of disbelief and its attendant heartache: Dolly Parton in a pale dress, Wynonna Judd in shades moaning “How Great Thou Art,” Merle Haggard in a black cowboy hat saying in a prerecorded video that he’d loved Tammy for what “seemed like nearly all [his] life.” The preceding years had been disastrous, a mess of illnesses and surgeries, painkillers, bad investments, bankruptcy, missed concerts, a controlling fifth husband, a career in atrophy.

Unlike other artists whose music stalled in late-midlife only to find a new expression in old age, Tammy never got the chance. Loretta Lynn, who was 10 years older than Tammy but lived 35 years longer, survived to see herself canonized. In Loretta’s final two decades, a new generation of women, as well as artists working in other genres, championed her music. The records she released toward the end of her life (2004’s Van Lear Rose, 2016’s Full Circle) are stripped-down triumphs. Same for Johnny Cash, whose cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” released a few months before he died at age 71, has more than a half a billion streams on Spotify.

It’s possible to read into the open slate of Tammy’s grave a somber acknowledgment of the songs she might have written if she’d lived into her sixties and seventies, the duets with wonderstruck youngsters, the documentaries, the farewell tour. But if her desire was for restraint and solemnity, or if circumstances at the time of her death necessitated as much, her dour resting place has had the opposite effect. Blank canvases tend to get painted, and Tammy’s marker has encouraged tributes galore.

When I visited, the space was covered in photographs and other paraphernalia stuck there, presumably, by family members and superfans. Between two bouquets of silk flowers, there were pencil drawings, press shots, pictures of grandbabies, and sundry images from her life in music, the changing hairstyles and costumes comprising a rough timeline: a yellow shift dress and updo from the “I Don’t Wanna Play House” era, the exposed shoulder and perm from the “Sometimes When We Touch” pop-country phase.

There were no pictures of her husbands except for a framed one of her and George Jones, “Together Forever” (We Go Together, from 1971, was their first album of duets) scrawled in cursive on the bottom right.

On George’s stone outside, the tributes were limited to a bottle of Budweiser and a single Marlboro cigarette. Reverence, respect, a tipping of the cowboy hat, that was what the offering suggested. Tammy’s votives went beyond veneration. The collage had the feel of a high school yearbook, a makeshift memorial on the side of a two-lane, a cutout gallery assembled in secret behind a bathroom mirror, a scrappy personal shrine fueled by gratitude and love as much as grief.

The most striking flourish was the most ephemeral. Between Tammy’s first and last name, right in the middle of the plaque, there was a single shining kiss-print. Someone had smeared their lips in red or maybe dark pink and planted a fat one smack-dab on the wall. Mwah! May it never fade. May some arrangement be struck for a new one to be applied every morning and every night, for what did Tammy’s music concede if not heartache’s interminability, and what was her singing if not a kiss blown to everyone with a broken heart?

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Featured image: Hubert Long/ Epic Records, publicity photo of Tammy Wynette, 1975, is in the public domain. Accessed January 2, 2025. Image has been cropped.