Jean Shepard

Since honky-tonk heroine Jean Shepard became an Opry member in 1955, 2005 marks her 50th anniversary in the cast. She’s the first singing woman ever to reach that milestone, but then, she’s a performer whose career has been marked by a whole series of firsts. Her early hit duet “A Dear John Letter,” sung with Ferlin Husky, was the first post-World War II country record by a woman to sell a million copies.

But her most-lasting breakthroughs can’t be measured in numbers. When Jean began recording for Ken Nelson at Capitol Records in 1952, there was really no precedent in country music for a young woman recording and touring on her own rather than as a member of a family team, couple, or as a band’s “girl singer.”

Jean’s remarkable records were hardly wilting lily stuff, either. The teenager who dared to sing “Twice the Lovin’ in Half the Time” as her first single would go on to have hard-country hits through the ’50s with “Don’t Fall in Love with a Married Man,” and “The Root of All Evil (Is a Man).” Maybe most daringly, in 1956 she took—for the first time on a country hit—the part not of a wronged wife but of “The Other Woman.” These forceful hits set the stage for Loretta Lynn, Jeannie C. Riley, Wanda Jackson, and other assertive country women that have followed. Jean’s own high-charting hits continued right on through the classic “Slippin’ Away” in 1973.

Born in Oklahoma, Jean grew up in Visalia, California—one of 10 children in a musically inclined family that listened to the Opry on the radio but had to save pennies to buy a Jimmie Rodgers record once a year. Hank Thompson spotted her when she was just 14, singing and playing bass in an all-girl band she’d formed, the Melody Ranch Girls; he quickly brought her to the attention of Capitol. She was an early star, along with Porter Wagoner, of Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee broadcasts out of Springfield, Missouri, and relocated to Nashville in 1958.

She married Opry great Hawkshaw Hawkins, with whom she had two sons, Don and Harold—the latter born and named for Hawkshaw after his death in the tragic plane crash that also took the life of Patsy Cline. Jean today is happily married to Benny Birchfield, a musician, singer, and member of Nashville’s music community.

Jean has been, over her 50 years at the Opry, a vocal proponent of undiluted, hard honky-tonk sounds on-stage and on the air. We can all hear what she has in mind directly—every time she sings.