Together For TV Country Stars Wynonna, Naomi Judd Join Forces For Tnn Special On Their ‘Life And Times’
The Judds may be past their multiplatinum heyday, but country music’s 1980s superduo is hardly forgotten, as Naomi Judd discovered during a recent night at the movies.
The singer was in the mood to see “The English Patient” and left her 1,000-acre Tennessee farm, Peaceful Valley, for a short drive to the nearby Franklin Cinema.
“I had no makeup on. I’m not sure my clothes even matched,” she recalls. “While waiting for the feature to begin, a huge group of college students filled the theater, and they all had their dates with them.
Before the movie started, these college students came up to me and one of them said, ‘You’re Naomi!’ They surrounded me and started telling me Judd stories.”
Some of those stories will be retold in the upcoming TNN documentary, “The Life and Times of the Judds,” set to air Wednesday at 5 p.m. It will be the Judds’ first TV special together since a serious liver ailment forced Naomi to retire in 1991, leaving daughter Wynonna to pursue a solo career.
According to Naomi, the TNN producers quickly discovered that whenever she and Wynonna sit down together in front of a camera and start answering personal questions, sparks can fly.
“Together we’re pretty unfiltered,” Naomi says with a laugh. “Wy and I had that raw uncertainty of life, this bizarre chemistry between us onstage. When we were sitting on the couch at the ‘Tonight Show,’ you didn’t know if we would be pulling each other’s hair out right in front of the camera. No matter where we were, there was a tension between Wy and I.”
In fact, Naomi says that from the Judds’ first meeting with RCA Records executives in early 1983, their volatile mother-daughter relationship has always been an explosive issue.
“I told the record company guys at that first meeting, ‘You know what? We might just self-destruct onstage, or on live TV or in public at the airport,”’ she relates. “‘I want to come clean with you and let you know right up front, because you’re getting ready to invest some money in us. This is a very unusual mother-daughter relationship.”’
Even the Judds’ family therapist said that “in her 44 years of practice she has never seen a mother and her daughters bonded as closely together as Wy and Ashley and I are,” Naomi reveals. (Ashley Judd, Naomi’s younger daughter, is a successful movie and TV actress.) “That’s because Wy was never out of my sight for 28 years. We shared a stage, a dressing room, a motel room, an airplane and a tour bus for 28 years.”
When Wynonna, who dropped her last name for professional reasons, went on to a successful solo career six years ago, the first few years of retirement were especially hard for her mother to deal with.
“What saved my butt,” Naomi says, “was the fact that my maternal instinct would rescue me whenever I would start giving a pity party for myself. I’d be thinking, this is so bad for me. Then I’d realize, Wy needs me more than ever, because she’s on her own and she needs my maternal advice. She had to go to the studio for the first time in her career by herself and create new music. To see her go onstage the first time - well, I’ve said, ‘Birth is messy’ - and that was a rebirth for Wy. To know that she was cutting that umbilical chord finally - that was wonderful.”
Yet, in looking back over the tumultuous times the duo survived, Naomi believes the ongoing drama between the Judds, which created country music’s most publicized soap opera, played a major role in their success.
“People see themselves in us,” Judd says. “No matter if they’re a single mother, clerk, nurse, welfare mother or a battered woman like me. The kids identified with Wy because they’d see how close we were and the tension it would bring. They’d say, ‘How in the world can she be around her mother so much?’ They knew that we were just putting one foot in front of the other on this adventure we were on. We were about communicating our deepest feelings, our beliefs, and filled with mischief and fun.”
Are there any plans for a reunion tour?
“We’ve never done anything for the money,” Naomi replies enigmatically. “So if Wy and I do anything together as the Judds again, it would not be to reunite. It would be because it was simply time.”
The hepatitis that forced Naomi’s retirement has since gone into remission, and this former registered nurse is practicing her own health regimen through what she describes as “the mind-body-spirit connection.” As a spokeswoman for the American Liver Foundation, Naomi now travels across the country lecturing on wellness. Just how does she manage to keep up such a demanding schedule and still stay healthy?
“When I think about it from another person’s standpoint, it does look impossible,” she says with a laugh. “I love to travel. It’s a big part of my life. However, I’ve learned how to pace my life, and I’m in complete control of the pacing of it.
“I have my rituals and my privacy and my time with my family. That’s essential for maintaining a sense of well-being and maintaining control in my life.”