Naomi Judd Interview

When did you first start singing?

Naomi Judd: I started singing when Wynonna was 12. That's a weird answer, but it was all predicated on her. So that's the origin. She was 12 years old. She was beyond rebellious. This was a kid who had the attention span of a gnat, and we were living on a mountaintop in Kentucky with no TV or telephone. So you can't even imagine the resentment that she had for me at that point in her life. I took her from living off of Sunset Strip in Hollyweird (and put her) on a mountaintop and put her in earth shoes and overalls and said, "This is the drill. Welcome to the country. Pretend you are in the middle of a National Geographic special. You will plant a garden. You will learn how to take care of animals. You will communicate with your lovely eight-year-old sister, and you will develop your imagination."
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And one night, I handed her an old flanky guitar, just so we could keep from killing each other, and something magical happened when I handed her that guitar. I said, "Hmm, very interesting." She just acted like it was an appendage of herself, and she would sit, literally for hours, hunkered over this thing, and I went, "Hmm. Now, if I was to participate with her, what would happen?" And really, it was that natural in evolution. There was never any epiphany where you went, "Bingo, I've got it. We'll go to Nashville and be country singers." We were just trying to communicate with each other.
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So it was more about bringing the two of you together?

Naomi Judd: Right. I actually had this very romantic noble notion of being a doctor and working with my people in Appalachia. We're from Kentucky, and I wanted to work with the unloved and the unlovely and was putting myself through nursing school at that point.

So that as we lived in a splendid isolation on this hilltop in Morrill, Kentucky, I was doing it for a multitude of reasons. One was to sort of decompress and demystify the Hollywood thing -- you know, the artifice, the greed, the commercialization -- just sort of to turn down the background noise. I needed the solitude definitely for my studies, and I really wanted the girls to understand their Appalachian heritage. I had already been hip to it my whole life, but I really wanted them to understand this very rich legacy that they had. And this was just such fertile ground for them to each tap into that intuition that gets beat out of kids these days. So when I took away all of this overstimulation and they really had to hear their own inner voices and open up, like I said, Wynonna was 12 and Ashley was eight at that point, and Ashley, frankly, didn't need music to communicate. She was one of these popular, well-rounded, "straight A" kind of kids, very autonomous. So I handed her a book, and the same thing happened. She began to develop a fantasy life with the written page.
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She became an actress and she just finished starring in a movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and Val Kilmer.

I look back on that summer and I think, as a mom, I was literally getting out of bed every day going, "Oh, my God, I don't know what I'm doing. I feel ill-equipped. I don't know how to handle these kids. I've just done the best I can from moment to moment, living a paycheck away from the streets." I got tired of being on welfare, so I put myself in college. And trying to give Ashley what she so needed and deserved as far as stability, and trying to give Wynonna something to get us through the day.
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Could you tell us how your recording contract came about? It's such an amazing story.

Naomi Judd: You know, it's the strangest thing to hear other people talk, or to read about yourself in print and to see something sort of become folklore, when you know the truth of the matter is that it was actually just a series of very ordinary moments. Earlier today, I was talking to Rosa Parks, and I thought, "All she was doing was being herself." All she was doing was saying, "This is what I stand for, and this is what I don't dig."

Wynonna and I walked into RCA Records on Music Row in Nashville, Tennessee, March 3rd of 1983, and supreme naiveté. I think I had on a $20 dress from the flea market and this old plastic gut string guitar, and our knees were knocking so loud, we thought they could hear us. And we sat down in front of these big enchiladas and said, "Hey, this is who we are, and this is what we do," and we sang a couple of songs that I had written, which were pretty wacky. They were pretty out there, and they said, "Go down the street to a restaurant, and let us sort of talk this over," and they walked down to the restaurant and stuck out their hand and said, "Congratulations. You're RCA's newest act." Of course, we thought that everybody did it that way. We were clueless. They were the big deal at that time in '83. I remember we walked down the halls -- and of course they had Elvis and Kenny Rogers -- in 1983, it was Alabama and Dolly Parton, and it was like the Hall of Fame. Wynonna just walked in like, "I'm in church. This is a sacred place. This is the mother church of country music."
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We didn't have a bio. We didn't have an eight-by-ten. We didn't have -- zero, zip, zilch. You talk about falling off the turnip truck! I love it, because that gives people hope, because that's what we're all about is saying that, "You know, technology is cool, it's all great, and the information highway and all that stuff, but you know what? Give me that human touch. Give me that one-on-one."
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