On this day in 1919, in Nashville, Ellen Muriel Deason was born. You know her as Kitty Wells, which is a stage name borrowed from an old song, and the sweetest kind of borrowing there is.

The story I love is 1952. She goes in for a session, sings an answer song called "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," takes union scale like everybody else in the room, and goes home thinking she may be about done with the record business. The Nashville players do their quiet work behind her — Owen Bradley was running most of the good sessions in that town in those years — and a steel guitar sits just under her voice doing all the sighing so she doesn't have to. She just tells it straight, which is harder.

Then the record wouldn't go away. First woman with a number one country hit, then a crossover, then fourteen straight years of top female vocalist awards, and a whole generation of singers coming up in the sixties who had somewhere to point. All from an afternoon nobody thought would amount to much. That happens more than you'd think. She died in 2012, at ninety-two.