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Today, from the Bond on Vinyl archives, we’re moving ahead to the Brosnan era and listening to music from GoldenEye!
Born in Mississippi in 1942, Virginia Wynette Pugh was married at 17 and was a mother of two by age 20. She picked cotton, worked in restaurants, and at a shoe factory before going to beauty school to support her family. In 1965, she began making repeated trips to Nashville, and within a year decided to move to Music City full-time. Though Pugh notably maintained her beautician’s license throughout her career (just in case), she quickly became one of the best-selling musicians of her time, the “First Lady of Country” – Tammy Wynette.
Following a string of top ten hits in 1967, Wynette was in the middle of her second divorce in 1968 when she wrote ‘Stand By Your Man.’ Though it reportedly only took 20 minutes to write and was recorded the same day, the song was a hit and was played at Wynette’s live shows for decades. Many critics, and her own record label, misinterpreted or questioned the message of the song. Wynette spent the rest of her life defending the tune, which she said was about accepting human shortcomings in the one you love.
Over the past 50 years, ‘Stand By Your Man’ has topped the charts on multiple occasions, appeared in Academy Award-winning films, and been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It’s also been covered by a variety of artists, including Carrie Underwood, the Dixie Chicks, Lyle Lovett, and, in 1995’s GoldenEye, Minnie Driver.
Around one hour into the film, when James Bond meets Valentin Zukovsky (played by Robbie Coltrane) for the first time, an uncredited Driver plays Irina. In a red glittery cowgirl get-up, she performs an intentionally dreadful rendition of ‘Stand By Your Man’ in a thick, fake Russian accent, prompting Bond to joke, “Who’s strangling the cat?”.
On top of the dozens of TV and film roles Driver has starred in over the past 30 years, she also put out a handful of solo albums in the 2000s, where she shows besides being a great actor, she can actually sing.
90. Tammy Wynette – Stand By Your Man
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