This episode was written and hosted by Natalie Weiner. She has been published in the New York Times, Billboard, and Rolling Stone, among many other outlets. She writes about music and sports and has a newsletter called Don’t Rock the Inbox. 

RESOURCES

The book that started it all is Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800-2000 by Robert K. Oermann and Mary A. Bufwack.

The oral history of the Women’s Room, a Nashville lesbian bar, which is only available in the Nashville Public Library.

Selections about Wilma Burgess from the Country Music Hall of Fame’s archives, including several early press releases. 

A copy of “who’s who” for the Country Music Programming Service, filled out about Wilma. 

The Orlando Evening Star on Wilma’s success in country music in November 1962. And again later that same month.

Wilma’s obituary and discography.

TRANSCRIPT

It happens to everyone. You come across a factoid that's so intriguing and real-sounding that you accept it at face value. Like, "Do you know, there  was a pioneering lesbian country singer who started Nashville's first 'women's only' bar called the Hitchin' Post?" That all sounds awesome, and it's partly true. 

 

In this case, the factoid was supported by a line in the bible of women in country music, Finding Her Voice, by Robert K. Oermann and Mary A. Bufwack. That line got me started down the wormhole of figuring out how true this rumor was. In the book, there's a paragraph about Wilma Burgess, which includes the line, "Wilma continued to record into the 1970s, and in the late 1980s she opened Nashville's first women's bar." 

 

Where it was and what its name was are nowhere to be found. I reached out to Oermann in hopes of answers, and he wrote back, "I think it was called the Silver Slipper or something like that. It was on Franklin Pike in the same block as the Douglas Corner songwriter club." 

 

Searching through archives revealed no evidence of a Silver Slipper, nor did the address that he offered after driving by the area. Dead end after dead end after dead end, with no evidence (and no Hitchin' Post) in sight.

 

As it turned out, trying to uncover more about Wilma's journey was a lesson not just in country music history, but in the ways that marginalized people's stories get forgotten because trying to survive requires them to fly below the radar.

 

Wilma's story started, like most country artists of her era, with a single: hers was called “Something Tells Me,” and was written by Justin Tubb, the oldest son of country music legend Ernest Tubb.

About Wilma's debut in 1962, Billboard wrote: “Here’s a new thrush on the label with a haunting and beguiling new sound. The tune is a strong ballad and she does it handsomely in front of a sharp, Floyd Cramer-type piano. This can go.” Sounds promising, right? 

 

Wilma had 14 songs break onto Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart between 1965 and 1973. She performed on the Grand Ole Opry, something every aspiring country singer dreams of, as well as several of its official tours. 

 

But she was never invited to become a member of the Opry, even though she hoped she would. Wilma told the Orlando Evening Star in 1972 that she would "soon" become a member. But one major factor likely compelled the country music establishment to keep Wilma at arm's length, both then and now: she was gay, and she didn't want to live like she wasn't. 

 

I had seen Wilma's name on a number of different round-ups of LGBTQ+ country singers, correctly naming her as a pioneer in the genre but with few additional details on her life and music. A few perfunctory Googles yielded next to nothing, so I set out to tell her story as thoroughly as I possibly could.

 

I'm Natalie Weiner. I’m a journalist who writes a lot about country music, and you may have seen my work in the New York Times, Billboard, and Rolling Stone. You’re listening to Have You Heard This One? A show about the stories from the back pages and hidden corners of music history.

 

Megan Davis: "When her sexuality did come out, it was either proposed to her as, 'Keep it a secret, and we'll be able to see how far we can go.’ Or things like, 'If people find out, your fan base will dwindle, no one will want to be a fan of yours anymore.' Just just those types of things."

That's Megan Davis, whose mother was in a relationship with Wilma until the singer passed in 2003. Her mother, who will not be named in this podcast, prefers not to speak publicly about Wilma to this day because of the implied taboo of their partnership. 

 

Davis was just a kid when she knew Wilma and remembers her as something between a second mother and a grandmother. Grandmother is how she introduced Wilma to people when she was growing up in the '90s because Wilma's relationship with her mother still wasn't fully accepted, decades after she'd tried to make it in Nashville. 

 

Today, it's hard to pin down many of the details of Wilma's story. Without her and most of the people who knew her during her musical heyday, there's little more than a tangle of hearsay and half-informed posts around the internet excitedly claiming that she was the "first openly lesbian country singer" and that she owned "Nashville's first lesbian bar." 

 

Making those kinds of assertions concretely is nearly impossible.

 

Hunter Kelly: I'm Hunter Kelly and I host PROUD Radio on Apple Music.

 

Hunter helped us break down how to see what people in the industry weren’t coming right out and saying about Wilma.

 

Hunter Kelly: There's no smoking gun where it's yes, Wilma Burgess was a lesbian. There's nothing in writing that actually says that because there wouldn't have been at the time. Much of it is reading between the lines there of what we can tell. There's no question Wilma challenged Nashville's status quo at many points over her career, and it's not hard to imagine that her potential was curtailed and her contributions minimized because of her sexuality.

 

Wilma was born on June 11, 1939, and grew up in Orlando, Florida. Throughout her life, she would cite an early Eddy Arnold concert as the moment she fell in love with country music. Singing, it seems, came naturally. Her official press materials include apocryphal tales about her wowing crowds from a young age with her voice, and even appearing onstage with Hank Williams when she was nine years old. According to her mother Arlene, Williams "begged" Wilma to travel with his show, but Arlene wanted her daughter to get an education first. 

 

Wilma did just that, graduating from Boone High School in 1957 and attending Stetson University in DeLand, Florida to become a physical education teacher. "Just think, I could be back in Florida teaching school — heaven forbid," she joked in a letter to a friend later in her life. While in college, her singing was confined to casual performances for her Phi Mu (MEW) sorority sisters, for which she accompanied herself on ukulele. 

 

Wilma befriended an aspiring Orlando songwriter named Lance Carpenter and joined him and the woman who would become her girlfriend, Ginny King, on a trip to Nashville to try and sell some of his songs. There, she met singer Jim Reeves, whose wife Mary would become Wilma's lifelong friend. 

 

She also met the “Mayor of Music Row," Charlie Lamb, who was a hugely influential country music journalist, publisher, manager, and promoter. He has no real contemporary equivalent, in part because his work made Nashville so much more of a hub for country's industry than it was when he started. 

 

Impressed by the way Wilma sang, Charlie helped her secure a contract with United Artists in 1962, where she’d record her first single. He advocated for her fiercely in his magazine, the Music Reporter, and even let her sleep on his couch. She bounced between an occasionally glamorous life in Nashville and a much more conventional one in Orlando, where she worked for a florist and an insurance agency while waiting for her big break to come. 

 

When she was in Music City, she had access to the city's A-listers thanks to her ties to Lamb and Jim Reeves, even attending Patsy Cline's 30th birthday party in the fall of 1962. A few months later, United Artists released her first single, "Something Tells Me," that melancholy pop waltz we heard at the beginning of this episode. 

 

Its sound earned Wilma comparisons to Jo Stafford, an opera-turned-pop singer who set the record for worldwide album sales for a woman in the ‘50s. The song's B-side, “Confused,” taps into the era's trendy girl group sound, and showed the shift in country music towards Brill Building-esque pop and away from the honky tonk and bluegrass stylings that had dominated the genre the decade prior.

 

"I still can't get used to it," Wilma told the Orlando Sentinel. "The first time I heard myself, I almost cried."

 

Bobby Braddock: We think of Orlando as being this big international city, you know, for people from everywhere. But back then it was, I mean, the little town I was from had very, very Southern culture. Wilma and all the people I knew in Orlando, well, they were pretty much Southerners like I was.

 

That's Bobby Braddock, a fellow Orlandoan who would become one of Nashville's most esteemed songwriters. He wrote "He Stopped Loving Her Today," which is often cited as one of the best country music songs of all time. 

 

Bobby befriended Wilma through mutual friends from Orlando. And he became a fan of hers, as both a person and a singer.

 

Bobby Braddock:  I thought of her as being sort of a female counterpart of Jim Reeves and had this resonant, velvet, buttery voice.

 

Wilma moved to Nashville full-time in 1964 after Charlie helped her secure a new deal with Decca Records. As Bobby recalls, it wasn't much of a secret that she was romantically involved with Ginny King. Ginny also worked in country music as an administrator for Jim Reeves' estate following his untimely death in July 1964. 

 

Natalie: It doesn't sound like she was trying to hide her sexuality at all when you knew her in the mid-60s. Would you say that's correct?

Bobby Braddock: I would say that's correct. Because she certainly didn't want to hide it from us, you know. We all became friends. My then-bride and I would go over and play Scrabble with her and her mom and her girlfriend.

Wilma and Ginny even took Bobby's first wife to the hospital when she was in labor. As he wrote in his memoir, they were "like family." 

 

As she immersed herself in Nashville's musical community, Wilma met Decca's vice president and lead producer Owen Bradley, who would become the most successful artistic collaborator of her career. Owen's work helping create the "Nashville sound" fundamentally changed country music in the ‘50s. Owen added string sections and encouraged singers to smooth out their melodies to fit in with the romantic, slick pop music of the era. Owen's style broadened country's audience considerably (for better and worse, depending on who you ask). In the recording studio, he added lush instrumentals to Wilma's songs that were well-suited to her powerful voice. 

 

Let’s pause here to play you some of Wilma Burgess’s biggest hits — because it’s nearly impossible to find them. Let’s start with the A-side of her first Decca single, “This Time Tomorrow.”

 

This song came out in 1964, and it’s very much in line with the countrypolitan sound — if it made you think of Patsy Cline, early Tammy Wynette, or any ‘50s girl group, then you know the vibe. Its worth noting that the song is co-written by Mel Tillis and Fred Carter, Jr., two legends in country music, and produced by Owen Bradley. 

 

The idea that Bradley had with the Nashville Sound was to soften up the rough edges of country and make it something that could compete with the pop music of the time because rock ‘n roll was eating its lunch. After the untimely death of Patsy Cline, he was looking for a new star. 

 

Now let’s flip it over to the B-side, "Raining On My Pillow." 

 

It’s a breakup song that’s decidedly told from the point of view of “the loneliest girl in town.” But if you listen to the whole song, you’ll notice something: there’s no heterosexual construct — we don’t know if she’s crying over a boy. That was implied at the time — heterosexuality was still the default. But it’s interesting to note that Wilma was already leaning into songs that didn’t present her as straight. And this one was written by her friend Lance Carpenter — the guy she came to Nashville with — who certainly knew she wasn’t. 

 

Then, in December 1965, came her break-through single, "Baby."

 

It’s a smooth blue-eyed soul ballad that went up to No. 7 on the Hot Country Singles chart. Her success led to her getting signed by the A-list Nashville manager Hubert Long, who also managed Skeeter Davis and Ray Price. 

 

That was a huge jump forward in her career, which she followed with another big win: two Grammy nods in 1966. Though she walked away empty-handed, the buzz helped propel her next two singles. First was "Don't Touch Me," a smooth ode to temptation that Hank Cochran wrote for his girlfriend Jeannie Seely to sing. 

 

Wilma recorded it first, and her version reached No. 12 on Billboard's country charts. Jeannie recorded the song too, though, and Jeannie’s version did a little better, going up to No. 2.

 

Wilma’s next single, “Misty Blue,” was also meant for another artist — Brenda Lee. 

 

When Brenda Lee opted not to record it, Wilma swooped in. It became the biggest hit of her career, reaching No. 4 on the charts. It’s one of the only songs by Burgess to remain widely available today.

 

You may have noticed one little thing about the songs Wilma sang: they were pretty gender-neutral. One of the only exceptions, a later single called "Ain't Got No Man," quote "didn't sit well with Wilma" according to her friend Bruce McGuire, who runs her Facebook fan page. But her producer Owen Bradley, who she otherwise had "great love and respect" for, in McGuire's words, pressured her to record it. 

 

Her next charting hit, "Fifteen Days," came in 1967. It was penned by country singer/songwriter Cindy Walker, a regular song pitcher to Bob Wills and Burgess’s good friend Jim Reeves. It’s another pretty, heartbreaking song showcasing Wilma's seemingly effortless ability to hit that upper register.

 

Wilma’s last hit was a sad, dreamy ballad called “Tear Time.” 

 

It hinted at a change coming to country music. These Nashville sound and countrypolitan tracks were falling out of fashion. 

“Tear Time” wasn’t the last song Burgess would release, but it was her last song to make the charts in any meaningful fashion.

 

Women were the decided minority as performers and writers on the country charts in the late '60s, much as they still are nearly 60 years later — that’s a fact that makes Wilma's modest success look considerably more impressive by comparison. Especially when you consider her willingness to not just forge into a space where she would be a minority, but to refuse to conform to the hyperfeminine norms for women in that space.

 

Here’s Hunter Kelly again.

 

Hunter Kelly: There was, at the time that Wilma was coming up, and there still is today, that oh, there's like room for one major female, you know one at a time kind of thing. It's really misogynistic and disgusting, but it's also how things operated, especially back then. Another thing too that would've probably held her back is that, in country music, especially for female acts, their male partners are a big part of it. In the listener's mind, when you have a song like “Fist City” or “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man.” Loretta's singing about Dolittle and they know him and he's part of the mythology in their head. Same way with Tammy Wynette, famously of course, with George Jones, they're able to play with that narrative. “Stand By Your Man” is about George Jones. But that would've been something that Wilma, doing this thing where, yes, I'm single, she didn't talk about a romantic partner. You're not gonna know a lot about her. And that's the thing in country music, is that the audience wants to feel like you're the artist is their neighbor and they know so much about them. That would've been something detrimental to her career in country music. 

 

Wilma's nephew Wayne Burgess is one of her only living relatives, and he remembers that part of Wilma's personality shining through even long after her Nashville days had concluded. He says she wasn't really interested in pinning herself down to any particular category, and never apologized for who she was.

 

Wayne Burgess: She was always, now that I look back of it, kind of butch, tomboyish, and stuff like that. Like I don't, I only saw, I saw her dresses was like some old recordings and old shows and stuff like that. But for the most part, she was always in jeans. She loved golf, which I know is a stereotype. She was kind of rugged, she was not feminine around me. I don't remember her ever wearing makeup in my presence. And I don't think that she was, you know, closeted about it. But I also think, and this is what I heard from her last girlfriend, that she really didn't want to talk about it. You know, creating definitions, sometimes is something you don't even want to do. Like, I'm, I'm me. And whatever I am is what I am. I don't want to put myself in categories. And so I think she might have had that mentality. 

 

Wilma was still on a powerful record label with notable advocates and more success than many of her peers when her career started to dwindle. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why her songs stopped climbing up the charts, and not at all hard to imagine that discrimination was a big part of it. It is also true, though, that Bradley's Nashville Sound was on its way out as Wilma's career started to taper off in the late '60s. 

 

Ironically, her peers were starting to find success not only with a brighter, more modern sound but also with more taboo topics. There was Jeannie C. Reilly's "Harper Valley P.T.A." and its sexual revolution-tinged lyrics, Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," and Loretta Lynn's "Fist City" which all topped the country charts in 1968 just as Wilma was sliding off of them. 

 

It still seems likely, though, that Wilma's insistence on being true to herself, on living as a lesbian woman who didn't necessarily love conforming to arbitrary ideals of beauty or lifestyle had an impact on her career in Nashville. We'll probably never know for sure. 

 

But whether her music was just put on the back burner by labels and promoters or whether she was actively pushed out of the business, her willingness to live her truth (as trite as it sounds) while being in the public eye was radical.

 

And though she didn't make her sexuality explicit to the public in the way that some contemporary artists and public figures choose to, it was basically the most open secret possible in a conservative business, and she paid for that, according to Bobby Braddock.

 

Bobby Braddock: I'm sure there was some barrier there that had something to do with her sexual orientation. 

 

Hunter Kelly has a theory about why she became a hit singer at the time, and how her sexuality would have played out in the Nashville music marketing machine.

 

Hunter Kelly: I think it has to do with the timing of when she first came on the scene. So it was a year after Patsy Cline had died in a plane crash, and as rock and roll was coming in, and Nashville needed a way to widen the audience. So if you wanted a big hit, you needed to go over to the pop station. And so they had a slot they needed to fill. She filled that slot, which really was her purpose. And I think that's another thing too, is that she would've been able to be one of the boys. On all of these tours, you hear about Patsy Cline going out you should be the only female on the tour, with all these men. So being rough and tumble in that way would've been an asset because you are as a woman, especially in that time, there's this thing where you want to fit in. 

 

Wilma had one more Top 40 country hit in 1973, a duet with Bud Logan called "Wake Me Into Love" released on Shannon Records, which was run by Jim Reeves' widow and Wilma's friend, Mary. 

 

That reached No. 14 on Billboard's country chart, and besides a little-publicized covers album released in 1982, marked the end of Wilma's recording career. 

 

By the '70s, the Nashville Sound had been mostly abandoned for dueling influences of the outlaws and another brand of pop crossover: disco. 

 

Wilma continued to perform, and set her sights on a different task. She wanted to start her own music venue.

 

Here we come to the claim that Wilma started Nashville's first "women-only bar." All available evidence suggests she did not. However, she was heavily involved with what seems to be Nashville's first lesbian bar, The Women's Room. Sarah Calise, a librarian and historian who runs the website Nashville Queer History and is researching a book on the topic, has been on the case for a while now.

 

Sarah Calise: The women's revolution is happening in the ‘70s across the United States. And the sexual revolution is happening, you get greater LGBTQ activism happening in the decade post-Stonewall, there's a lot going on there. So it makes sense that the Nashville lesbian community starts an organization and then starts a newsletter. And through that newsletter, I see you know, when the women's room opens up on Eighth Avenue South and the advertisement in the October/November 1980 issue of the newsletter says “women's room now open, Nashville's first lesbian bar.” And you know, they can make that claim. Maybe it's true or not. So I still dug further just to see and I really cannot find anything else that was a bar owned by lesbians specifically for lesbians. My research knowledge, the Women's Room was it. 

 

The Women's Room, which was at 2110 Eighth Ave South in Nashville, was open from 1980 to the fall of 1982. Then it changed ownership and name to The Parlor, but remained a lesbian bar. Wilma Burgess' club, Track 9, opened September 13, 1982 at 2025 Eighth Ave South in Nashville. It was across the street from the Women's Room. 

 

Track 9's opening, just three months after the city's storied Bluebird Café opened its doors, was covered by all the music press and the Tennessean. Wilma performed there often. Per its advertising, the club was open for "lunch, dinner, entertainment and dancing" seven days a week. Jeannie Seely, Pam Tillis, Billy Joe Shaver, and Steve Earle all graced its stage. It being across the street from the city's only lesbian bar, and owned by someone who was a part of the local queer community, doesn't seem like it was a coincidence.

 

Sarah Calise: It's the late 70s, where that lesbian movement here starts to pick up. So it kind of makes sense to me that that's when she was like, about that late 70s, early 80s, when she would open something, right? And make it known to her fellow lesbians, because they clearly, they clearly went to this place.

 

Wilma's only published tie to Nashville's lesbian community was a mention in the newsletter that Sarah just told us about.

 

Sarah Calise: That one line in the newsletter where they don't even say her last name, yeah. Makes me think she definitely was part of that community. Because people, they just assumed they would know who Wilma is.

 

The Women's Room was radical for its time. Co-owner Gail Dubois recalled police raids and Molotov cocktails being thrown at the bar in an oral history. Sarah shared her notes on the transcript of that oral history, which is only available at the Nashville Public Library, with me.  

 

Sarah Calise: We have like this whitewashing that has happened about Nashville Civil Rights history, where it's like, supposedly has the Southern hospitality to it. It's called the Nashville way. Like, this is how we do things here. Right? You kind of get a similar sense of that with like, the queer history here. Like, clearly, like there were police raids. That's a violent act to me. Molotov cocktails, arson that never has really gotten solved, like multiple bar gay bars burning down or having fire issues. 

 

Track 9 didn't last a year. It seems like Wilma's backers pivoted, and then, by the end of 1983, the club had been replaced by Zanie's Comedy Club, which remains in the building today. Wilma tried to start another club in Nashville called the Stanley Station, but it doesn't appear that that venture went far either. She got her real estate license, and more or less defected from the industry completely. 

 

For the last ten years of her life, Wilma dedicated herself to family. She met Megan Davis's mom, and started to lead a much quieter life, which included downplaying her sexuality. Davis describes how Wilma and her mom never wanted her to feel people's bigotry. 

 

Megan Davis: Prior to her relationship with my mom, she was open about it. I don't think that she tried to hide anything. I think that when she got into a serious relationship with my mother, and me and my sister were younger, and she knew that she wanted to have a family with us. She was doing it more so for me and my sister at that point, prior to that, it wasn't something that she was ashamed of. I never knew up until I was probably 17 years old that my mother and Wilma were in an actual relationship. I always thought that they were just best friends. They kept everything very, you know, straightforward. There was no hand holding, there was no PDA, there was nothing, and Wilma wanted it that way. Wilma actually never wanted me or my sister to know that part because she was scared that we were going to get bullied at school." 

 

Queer women artists in the folk and rock scenes were getting more visibility by the '90s, thanks to hitmakers like Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge, and events like Lilith Fair. Yet the AIDS epidemic bred still more stigma on the queer community, and Nashville and its country music industry was as conservative as ever. It's understandable, then, that Wilma never saw much of a window for a career renaissance and instead focused on family, as her nephew Wayne remembers. 

 

Wayne Burgess: She was very kind, very friendly. A big laugher, like her and my dad found stuff funny all the time. They had a really fun bond, and that was kind of nice to see. And I regret not knowing or seeing more, you know.

 

Megan also has many fond memories of Wilma.

 

Megan Davis: "She helped raise me and my sister. So from the time I was about three years old, until she passed away when ever I was 13. So a pretty good chunk of my upbringing. She was very, a sense of humor, like no, no other. She would give the shirt off of pretty much anyone's back, she was, you know, the friend that you would call on. She was an amazing cook. Everyone still, to this day, like any of my friends that came over to stay the night or, you know, our family members who obviously she was a part of our family. Still rant and rave about her cooking. She was definitely one of a kind. Probably still, to this day, one of the best people I've ever had the pleasure of, you know, knowing and having in my life."

 

Wilma died unexpectedly while in the hospital for some tests, suffering a heart attack on August 26, 2003. She wasn't widely memorialized. 

 

Braddock recalls reaching out to the Tennessean after her death.

 

Bobby Braddock: When I heard that she passed away, I got in touch with the reporters to cover music business, for the local paper, morning paper, the Tennessean, which is basically good paper and it was pretty much the news organ of the local music business. And I couldn't understand why there was nothing in there about Wilma's passing. And he told me that he had run it by the editors and they passed on it. 

 

Wilma's music, her legacy, is essentially lost, and presented on streaming services incomplete, with bad metadata. YouTube, with its fan-uploaded rips of CDs, LPs, and 45s, is the most thorough resource for those who'd like to listen to her music. 

 

We went looking for it, to try and track down the rightsholders for this podcast and got crickets back from Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company who happens to own the label Burgess recorded for way back then. And since she didn’t write any of her own songs, finding the publishing rights for them is an even bigger mess. Hunter Kelly has been trying to bring her music to streaming services for a minute as well.

 

Hunter Kelly: I've wanted to play Wilma on Proud Radio. I am in touch with Universal Music Group who owns, Decca. And so I'd emailed them asking about the original masters. And so they looked into it and they weren't at a point where they could deliver them for them to be streaming. I'm not really a hundred percent sure on why that is. I don't know if the original masters were lost to time. Universal Music Group also had a devastating fire in Los Angeles where they lost a lot of their masters and artwork. But the fact of the matter is that with Wilma, there could be a thing where the recordings are out there and if Wilma was a major star, then there would be the monetary incentive for them to go and do what they needed to do to get these tapes up to the level they needed to be to stream.

 

In YouTube comment sections and on her Facebook fan page, the people who remember this long-ignored country pioneer can find each other. Perhaps, with this episode, they can learn that she found some peace through all the unfairness, as Megan Davis puts it. 

 

Megan Davis:  She had happy ever after with us and told her very last breath. And I know that at that point in her life, that's exactly what she wanted.