Wynonna Judd is finding her way
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE >> Wynonna Judd was almost late for her date 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 Sunday 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 near the stage and sighed with relief. Maybe people wouldn't know she was there.
A dozen songs into the secret set, Mitchell began to purr “Both Sides Now,” the tune Judd — who with her mother, Naomi, 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 was there.
“It flipped me like a pancake, man, everything coming out. I was such a beautiful little mess,” she said on a recent Saturday afternoon in an enormous Nashville 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.”
Last month, Wynonna 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 United States with a cast of guests. 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 said of her mother's death. “It's given me a louder voice. I want to do stuff that makes people say, `What are you doing?' ”