ON HER OWN
After losing her mother and lifelong singing partner, Judd hopes to become the musician she always wanted to be
Wynonna Judd was almost late to sing with Joni Mitchell. It was July 2022, and the country star had rented a yacht off the Rhode Island coast while she rehearsed for her idol’s first public performance since a 2015 brain aneurysm. That afternoon, the captain struggled to find a dock, forcing Judd to race to the Newport Folk Festival. She arrived a minute before showtime, squeezed into a spot toward the rear of the onstage throng and sighed with relief. Maybe people wouldn’t know she was there.
A dozen songs into the set, Mitchell began to purr “Both Sides Now,” the tune Judd — who with her mother, Naomi Judd, made up one of Nashville’s most indelible duos — had sung during her debut performance, at eighth grade graduation. Cameras caught her over Mitchell’s right shoulder, often sobbing as she occasionally harmonized. Honest and unmitigated, the footage went viral. Everyone knew that Wynonna Judd was there.
“It flipped me like a pancake, man, everything coming out. I was such a
beautiful little mess,” she said recently in a Nashville, Tennessee, rehearsal hall.
“I was thinking about my mom, how much she loved my voice. And I was so freaking mad at her for leaving me. I realized I was an orphan.”
Less than three months earlier, a mediator who has worked with the entire Judd family for more than a decade commanded Wynonna Judd to race to her mother’s house across the 1,000-acre farm they shared outside Nashville. Her younger sister, actor Ashley Judd, was already there. Wynonna Judd arrived nine minutes later to find paramedics ready to rush her mother and lifelong singing partner into an ambulance. Naomi Judd had struggled for decades with severe depression and panic attacks. She died that morning, her death ruled a suicide, the day before the Judds were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“We were still at the hospital,” Cactus Moser, Wynonna Judd’s husband, manager and drummer, remembered. “Her exact words were ‘I’m walking my mother into the Hall of Fame tomorrow. We’re not going to bail.’ She is an oak.”
The tearful ceremony was Judd’s first step in moving toward her own future. Since the Judds disbanded three decades ago, her relationship with her mother had been fraught at best, an exercise in boundaries. Family dinners observed firm time limits. Meetings about music were led by managers.
In January, Judd began what may prove the pivotal phase of putting the past to rest: the second leg of the Final Tour, a sweeping survey of the Judds’ bygone country supremacy, performed over 15 dates across the U.S. with a cast of guests that includes Tanya Tucker, Brandi Carlile and Kelsea Ballerini. When it is over, she says, the rest of her career can begin. Now a 58-year-old grandmother, one of country music’s most venerated singers is electrified by the idea of making records that turn away from what Naomi Judd long called “Judd music.”
“It’s made me even more determined to be myself,” Wynonna Judd said of her mother’s death in a second interview on her tour bus. “It’s given me a louder voice. I want to do stuff that makes people say, ‘What are you
doing?’ ”
With a new record deal through Anti-, Judd hopes to mine the rock, folk and soul she wanted to sing before her mother suggested a family band, when Judd was still a teenager. Already, she has released new music with an indie-rock descendant, Waxahatchee. She started a band a few years ago with singer-songwriter Cass McCombs.
For much of the ’80s, the Judds were country music’s sweethearts next door, the mother-daughter duo mistaken for sisters. The Judds’ preternatural Kentucky harmonies politely rebuffed the “Urban Cowboy” craze sparked by the 1980 film, and country’s increasing slickness. Wynonna and Naomi Judd sang about grandpa and the good ol’ days, and then held each other in love or heartache. Naomi Judd was the playful one, charming crowds as she sang backup; Wynonna Judd, more stoic, was the generational singer out front.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the business — any business, whether it’s country or rock or pop, anything — that has a greater voice than Wynonna,” said Dolly Parton, a longtime mentor, in an interview. “With all the passion she has, all the stuff she feels, she was able to get that voice out there.”
The Judds’ life was “a wonderful duet,” Naomi Judd wrote in her autobiography, “the two of us against a frightening and unknown world.” But for Wynonna Judd, the songs were more idyllic than their circumstances. Naomi Judd was a single mother, pinballing between California, Kentucky, Texas and Tennessee for opportunity or inspiration. By the time Wynonna Judd was 8, she felt that the burden of raising Ashley Judd was, in part, hers. Her mother never told her that she and her sister had different fathers.
Wynonna Judd loved Joni Mitchell and Bessie Smith but longed to be Linda Ronstadt or Bonnie Raitt. She wanted to build a sizzling rock band, not be in a country duo with her mother.
Their meteoric rise was interrupted in October 1990, when Naomi Judd announced her sudden retirement as hepatitis C ravaged her health. Wynonna Judd wanted to quit, too. “It’s like being in the middle of a divorce,” said Judd, who has endured two of them. “How can you possibly think about dating?”
But as Judd built a solo career, her mother found other ways to impose. Judd believes that her mother once hired a private investigator to learn if her boyfriend was gay. Her mother resented that Judd toured while she stayed at home. It got worse after 2009, when Judd partnered with Moser, who encouraged her to try new songs and fresh settings of the Judds’ standbys.
“Mom was not a big fan of me and Cactus, because she desperately wanted to be on the road,” Judd said. “There’s a piece of me that feels like I left her at the party.”
In 2019, an unexpected invitation arrived. Nashville promoter Leslie Cohea saw Judd perform at a festival, as her mother watched from backstage. Cohea began hatching a plan for a final Judds hurrah: a full tour, taking the hits to arenas one last time.
Sandbox Entertainment shaped a comprehensive plan to relaunch the Judds, hinging on a taped outdoor performance of their hit, “Love Can Build a Bridge,” for the CMT Music
Awards in April 2022. They announced 10 tour dates that night, quickly selling most of the tickets.
The performance, however, wobbled. For the first time in Judds history, Naomi Judd was late, flustered by the unseasonably cold weather and an edit made to shorten her anthem for television. “She went from being at home, putting on makeup, to being in a multimillion-dollar production,” Wynonna Judd said. “She wasn’t prepared.”
Judd is not big on regret. She doesn’t think she could have saved her mom. “Once you make that choice, you’re determined to carry it out,” she said flatly. “There’s only so much guilt to carry around.” Still, she wondered if they should have debriefed more, unpacking the anxiety of working together again.
“I missed that, because I was gone,” she said, referring to a tour of her own. Two weeks later, so was Naomi Judd.
In the weeks after Naomi Judd’s death, Wynonna Judd wasn’t sure if she was ready for the Final Tour, to say goodbye to the Judds without her mother. She canceled a run with her own band and wondered if continuing was crass. “There was no way I was going to sing these songs without her,” she said.
The feedback from a retinue that included Moser, her sister and even her farm manager was nearly unanimous: Play.
Parton demanded as much in front of a crowd at a private memorial service. “I told her that Naomi had her journey, and she had hers. None of that was her fault,” recalled Parton. “I told her to get … out there on the road. It’s time for her to go on and do the great things she’s capable of doing, a new start.”
Moser and Wynonna Judd are eight songs into an album. It feels so real and vulnerable, Judd said, it makes her uncomfortable.
“It’s the most intimate I’ve ever been,” she noted of a song called “Broken and Blessed.” “And that’s because of my mother.”
Two years ago, after her biological father died, she finally met her brother, Michael, when she called him without warning on his birthday. They talked for five hours the first time they met.
She never told Naomi Judd about her new family. Wynonna Judd beamed, though, when she mentioned someday introducing him to Ashley Judd. Their relationship has become closer, Wynonna Judd explained, the result of having and respecting boundaries.
“We’re in such good places now,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.”