“Woman to Woman”

  

The Tammy Wynette–Billy Sherrill songwriting partnership produced such well-known hits as “Stand By Your Man,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” In the latest issue of The Believer, however, Ken Tucker extols the virtues of one of their lesser known songs:

‘“Woman to Woman” is something else: a fierce melodrama in which Wynette and Sherrill present a trio of vivid archetypes: Victim, Victimizer, and the Despairing Woman Who’s Been Both of Them. If Jim Thompson had ever decided to record a single with Patricia Highsmith singing, this would have been their B-side. “Woman to Woman,” unlike so many country songs, isn’t about an act or the aftermath of infidelity; it’s more theoretical. It’s about the inevitability of infidelity, and as such it proves more despairingly doom-struck than a million other cheating songs.’

“Tammy Wynette’s “Woman to Woman”,” Ken Tucker, The Believer

Watch Woman to Woman (alas, not the Haw Haw filming):