“I don’t know if I’m really believing the whole thing,” said Judd, 27, from her home outside Nashville last week. “When I started work on this album, I really felt I was starting all over again. My identity for the last eight years-actually 27 years-has been as Naomi’s kid. What if people aren’t as interested in Wynonna as they were in the Judds?”
That seemed a good question. For eight years, the Judds were one of the top acts in country music, and a spark for the music’s resurgence. They also embodied one of country’s more pliable identities: they were whatever you wanted them to be. A mother-daughter team who ditched their given names (they’re really Diana and Christina) but publicly played up their roots, they were the offspring of Appalachia or of Hollywood, a single mother and a latchkey kid espousing traditional family values above all. Self-made and genuine, they were the sharpest innocents in Nashville, voices of homespun purity with just a slight back-beat of cheap titillation. Whatever we wanted, they were there to fill the void.
On her own, Wynonna isn’t as sure of her identity. “I was born to be this way,” she asserts on the opening number, and this sentiment echoes throughout the album–but just what way she was born to be is never quite clear. She was always the robust voice of the Judds, but not the guiding spirit. Before going out on her own, she admitted, “I had to ask myself, ‘What do I want to say to these people? What do I want to do?’ " After much speculation that she would break off in new directions musically, she tugs mightily on the same heartstrings the Judds pulled, and even wrings a last tear over her mother’s illness, as Naomi joins her to sing the pointed “When I Reach the Place I’m Goin’.” Though her record company is playing down the Judds connection, Wynonna’s album, for all its talk of self-assertion, is pure Judd music.
The album owes its instant success partly to the country boom, but also partly to a new fundamentalism in American music. Alienated by increasingly pastiched pop music, listeners have turned not just to Garth Brooks but also to the folksy nostalgia of Michael Bolton, Bonnie Raitt and Natalie Cole, all working a constantly shifting mix of prerock styles. Neither country nor pop, with tinges of gospel and blues, “Wynonna” taps this market but dissipates in its ambiguities. Her ballads are syrupy, without the Judds’ overwhelming conviction in syrup. " I’ve always looked at myself as a hope seller,” she explained– then added, all seasoned innocence, " I love that word platinum." From such contradictions, the Judds worked corny but real American magic. Wynonna has yet to find her balance.
