Two years after Tammy Wynette released her controversial single, “Stand by Your Man”, the country star scored another No. 1 single that followed the same storyline (and received the same criticism). This divisiveness was so pervasive that, decades later, when Jessica Chastain was playing Wynette in a six-part biopic series about the singer and her third husband, George Jones, the actor warned listeners about the song’s content.
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“Run, Woman, Run” follows many of the same cues as “Stand by Your Man”. The narrator speaks to a young woman who has just told her partner she wants to leave. “But before you throw it away,” Wynette sings, “What you think you don’t want today / don’t give it up for the new life that you found.” In the chorus, the idea is even more plain: “Run, woman, run / run back to him and fix things up the very best you can / Tell him you missed him while you were gone.”
That sort of blind loyalty is the same crux on which “Stand by Your Man” rests. “If you love him, you’ll forgive him / even though he’s hard to understand / And if you love him, oh, be proud of him / ‘cause after all, he’s just a man.”
Tammy Wynette Scored Another Divisive No. 1 Hit in 1970
Especially within the context of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 70s, many critics viewed Tammy Wynette as a perpetrator of outdated, patriarchal values that encourage women to endure mistreatment from their male partners because, well, “he’s just a man.” Wynette said she wasn’t trying to make a political statement. But even if she wasn’t, she certainly doubled down on the idea with “Run, Woman, Run”.
Her 1970 No. 1 hit spent two weeks at the top of the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. The song became an enduring part of Wynette’s musical legacy, for better or worse. In 2022, when Jessica Chastain stepped into Wynette’s shoes for the biopic series George & Tammy, the actor faced this controversy head-on.
The day she was to perform “Run, Woman, Run” on set, Chastain approached the group of extras who were serving as her audience. “I looked out at all these sweet, young faces staring up at me and said, ‘Girls: I do not want you to listen to the lyrics of this song. Please. I love Tammy. But she did not believe this. She was married five times. So, do not take any of this as gospel,’” Chastain recalled in a 2022 interview with The Guardian.
Still, Chastain isn’t blaming Wynette for her song matter. (Ann Booth, Duke Goff, and Dan Hoffman wrote it, anyway). The actor compared Wynette to Loretta Lynn to make her case. “[Loretta Lynn] was a nice woman married to her husband for a long time. Tammy Wynette was from a broken home, had multiple marriages, and there was something so unsavory about that, that she had to sing about stand-by-your-man.”
Or, in this song’s case, run-woman-run.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
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