Last night, just before the Country Music Association Awards – where Swift picked up all four of the trophies she was nominated for, including the coveted Entertainer of the Year award – a reporter from USA Today asked Wynonna, 45, if she had any advice for the 19-year-old singer.
Never one to hold back on her opinion anyway, Wynonna (who at 22 was the previous youngest CMA Entertainer of the Year nominee) responded with a baldly brutal and seemingly bitter tirade that, among other things, faulted the CMA for giving its highest honor to someone too young to appreciate it.
“You want my honest comment? It’s too much too soon,” Judd opined with her mother and former singing partner Naomi standing at her side. “Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. It’s too much of a good thing too soon.
“My thing is, being a home-school mom, I want kids to earn it, and I think some time … ‘cause mom and I rode in a car for the first year of our career to visit radio stations. There was a making of the star, there was a rising up, and the fans went with us. Now it’s over coffee breaks, the success, almost. You have to play catch up … It’s like the girl who wins an Oscar and she’s under 20. What do you do from here?”
You listening Taylor? Auntie Wynonna says that’s a wrap. Pack up your guitar and your touring wardrobe, find a nice boy to marry (you and that werewolf kid from the “Twilight” movies would probably have an adorable brood), settle down in suburban Nashville or Atlanta and write your memoirs. You’re finished here.
Gimme a break. So because Wynonna believes she and her family had to work harder for their success, anyone who doesn’t follow the same path doesn’t deserve it? Really?
It’s called the Entertainer of the Year award, not the Lifetime Achievement award or the Person Who Had to Crawl Farthest Through Broken Glass to Get Here award.
And the more than 5,000 members of the Country Music Association, who tend to be a pretty close knit and level headed crowd, have every right to present it to the person they believe has done the most to raise the profile of country music or who they feel was the most, well, entertaining over the past year.
The most puzzling thing about this outburst is that Judd and her mother really have more than paid their dues and in doing so have earned the respect of their peers as well as their fans. Normally, when artists find themselves in that position, they assume the role of elder statesman, benevolently imparting nuggets of advice and pearls of wisdom to the next generation.
We might expect this kind of thing from a peer of Swift’s like Miranda Lambert or Carrie Underwood (who did seem a little put out by Taylor’s successes last night), but coming from Wynonna – and I’ll grant that it might actually have been well intentioned – it just seems really bitchy.
Oh and here’s one more little piece of news that’s not likely to make Wynonna any happier – earlier today, the CMA announced that Swift also picked up its International Artist Achievement Award. And what does the award represent? Funny you should ask. It “recognizes outstanding U.S.-based artists who contribute to the awareness and development of country music throughout the world.”
So what do you think? Did Taylor Swift deserve all the awards she took home last night? Or is Wynonna right in claiming it’s too soon in her career for Swift to be walking away with accolades it’s taken other artists decades to win?