At ninety and ninety five they held each other and wept before the casket of their eldest daughter and that devastating moment in Madison brought nearly seventy years of shared family road life to a heartbreaking halt just weeks after they had marked more than seven decades of marriage
Ruby Wright passed away at her home in Madison Tennessee on September 27 2009 after a long illness and a fatal heart attack stole her one month shy of her seventieth birthday leaving Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright supported by their remaining children Bobby and Carol Sue as they buried the girl who had ridden with them since the Southern radio days of the 1940s
Their extraordinary love story began long before fame arrived when nineteen year old cabinetmaker Johnnie Wright and eighteen year old Muriel Deason eloped on October 30 1937 and the young woman who would later become Kitty Wells joined him on a hard traveling life that soon included Ruby born on October 27 1939 and Bobby born in 1942 and Carol Sue all tucked into the back seat while Wright teamed with his brother in law Jack Anglin as Johnnie and Jack and the family drove between radio stations across North Carolina and West Virginia and Georgia and Louisiana
Everything changed in May 1952 inside Owen Bradley’s Castle Studio in Nashville where Wells recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” mainly to collect the union scale pay for the session and the record then spent six weeks at number one and made her the first solo woman to top the Billboard country chart
Rather than leaving their children behind while they chased success on the road they brought Ruby and Bobby and Carol Sue onto the stage and turned touring into a precious family life
They built the Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright Family Show and played up to two hundred dates a year and by age thirteen Ruby was touring regularly and had been signed to RCA Victor by Chet Atkins and was singing in the teen trio Nita Rita and Ruby before she later joined her sister as one of The Wright Sisters
In 1956 Carol Sue joined her mother on the Top 20 duet “How Far Is Heaven” and in 1964 Ruby reached number thirteen on the Billboard country chart with her solo recording “Dern Ya” as an answer song to Roger Miller’s “Dang Me” while Bobby played the recurring role of Southern radio operator Willy Moss on the television comedy McHale’s Navy before earning his own Top 15 country hit in 1971 with “Here I Go Again” after joining the family syndicated television program in 1969
The family bill endured even after Jack Anglin died in a car crash in March 1963 while traveling to Patsy Cline’s funeral service in Madison and even as Wright recorded his 1965 solo number one hit “Hello Vietnam” and in 1983 Wells and Wright opened the Family Country Junction Museum and Studio in their hometown of Madison where Ruby and Carol Sue helped greet devoted visitors and care for collections filled with their mother’s gingham stage dresses and kitchenware and treasured awards
On New Year’s Eve in 2000 eighty one year old Wells and eighty six year old Wright stepped onto the stage at the Nashville Nightlife Dinner Theater for their final official concert together after more than six decades of family touring and after closing the museum that same year they settled into quiet days at their brick home on Lone Oak Road in Madison and worshipped at the Madison Church of Christ at the corner of Gallatin Road and Old Hickory Boulevard while their children stayed nearby in middle Tennessee and gathered for Sunday dinners and tender anniversaries
Over the next two years after Ruby’s passing the quiet weight of grief and advancing age wore heavily on Wright’s health at their Madison residence and around one o’clock on the morning of September 27 2011 he died at home at age ninety seven on the exact two year anniversary of Ruby’s death and just thirty three days before his seventy fourth wedding anniversary while his former Tennessee Mountain Boys bandmates served as honorary pallbearers at the Madison Church of Christ
Left in the quiet of a house filled with nearly seventy four years of shared memories Wells lived her final months under the loving daily care of Bobby and Carol Sue and her eight grandchildren until she passed away following a stroke at age ninety two on July 16 2012 less than ten months after her husband and days later her family returned to the pews of the Madison Church of Christ and laid her beside Johnnie and Ruby at Spring Hill Cemetery less than five miles down Gallatin Road from the home they had shared for more than half a century