‘Prison on wheels,’ country music star Wynonna Judd says of touring with her mother
Kentucky native Wynonna Judd spoke recently about touring the country with her mother in the 1980s and compared it to what pop superstar Billie Eilish encounters now.
One half of the chart-topping duo The Judds, Wynonna Judd said on Fox Nation’s “The Pursuit! With John Rich” that touring alongside her mother, Naomi Judd, was “prison on wheels for me at the time.”
“So I’m not real thrilled with the setup and yet I’m so in awe of the journey and what it’s going to be like that it was harsh,” Wynonna Judd said on the Fox Nation show. “She was in the back of the bus and I’d go back there and do her hair every night. There’s a whole story about that and how the dynamics worked. ... So there was never a sense of independent time.”
The Judds won seven straight Academy of Country Music Awards for Top Vocal Duo from 1984 to 1990. They also took home five Grammy Awards for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group.
Wynonna, who was born in Ashland, Kentucky, went on to a successful solo career after her mother was diagnosed with Hepatitis C in 1991.
Touring with her mom as a teenager and young adult, Wynonna compared it to what the 18-year-old Eilish encounters now. Eilish’s mother goes on tour as her assistant and her dad is the lighting director for her crew, according to E! Online.
“I look at Billie Eilish, and I go, she still tours with her family. That’s me. And I didn’t have time to step away and party and have fun,” Wynonna Judd said on “The Pursuit!” “The band and she partied. I was 18 years old. Think about it. I didn’t have time — I didn’t have time, I’m also the lead singer, and we’re doing two-hour shows, sometimes two times a day.”
Wynonna and Naomi together had 14 No. 1 songs in a five-year span, but the tribulations on the road between the mother and daughter have long been chronicled.
During a 2018 interview with The Tennessean prior to the unveiling of their exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, Wynonna said, “In one of our biggest fights, we talked about which one of us would be institutionalized.”
Naomi told ABC’s Robin Roberts in 2016 that the two “were still a little estranged from each other” after growing apart while filming a reality show in 2011.
This story was originally published February 17, 2020 at 4:47 PM with the headline "‘Prison on wheels,’ country music star Wynonna Judd says of touring with her mother."