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By Root 1042 0

with deep pleasure, the joy my mother and sister brought to tens of thousands people each concert. I had my own favorite songs and waited to hear how my sister would hit certain notes, appreciating creative treatments she would give signature Judd licks, especially savoring the bluesy numbers that really showed off her remarkable voice. I beamed when folks recognized their favorite songs, watching women cut loose to “Girls’ Night Out,” loving it when couples wrapped their arms around each other’s waists on “Love Is Alive,” and laughing at the bit in “Mama He’s Crazy” when some poor fool of a man near the front would be put on the spot to sing into my mother’s microphone. After shows, I would sleep with my sister on her pull-out sofa bed, and some of my fondest memories are of those calm nights after electrifying shows, reading Ellen Gilchrist and Flannery O’Connor to her, with her little dog, Loretta Lynn, curled up with us, Mom up front in the jump seat looking at “life’s highway,” as she called it, eating her nightly bowl of popcorn with Banjo by her side as the miles rolled by.

Mom slowed down a bit after she discovered in 1990, while I was a senior in college, that she had contracted hepatitis C, a chronic, potentially fatal liver disease. The Judds embarked on an emotional farewell tour, after which Wynonna had to launch a solo career. My sister was bereft, while also stunningly successful. I continued to participate from the distant sidelines, as usual. I found that tour to be an especially histrionic one, and in general I didn’t enjoy the drama. I had already had too much of it.

Mom’s semiretirement from recording and touring gave her some time on her hands, and she used it to write her memoirs. In 1993, the whole life story that she had invented for herself and told to others for years was suddenly put out there in black and white. Love Can Build a Bridge was Naomi Judd’s self-portrait as a quirky but lovable single mom who became a star after overcoming great hardships while raising her two daughters by herself, after being abandoned by her no-good husband. The problem was some of it was simply false, and often what was not patently false was at least hotly disputed by family members, who remembered things very differently.

For instance, in the book she described the heartbreaking time when her beloved brother Brian was diagnosed with lymphoma when he was fifteen and she was seventeen. She named the doctor who saw Brian and the type of cancer: reticulum cell sarcoma. She said that her parents made the trip to Ohio with Brian and left her home alone so that she could attend the first day of her senior year. She described the clothes she laid out the night before and the sharpened pencils and notebooks lined up on the dresser. But she did not name the boy who came over that night and, she wrote, “took advantage” of her emotional vulnerability and also took her virginity. By omission, she implied yet again that her occasional boyfriend Michael Ciminella caused her pregnancy.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, not only did Dad know the truth, but by now so did almost everybody else in our family—and in Ashland, Kentucky. It was an open secret. I remember one family friend, thinking it was normal chitchat, pulling an Ashland High School yearbook off the shelf to show me Charlie Jordan’s class picture, commenting on how much my sister favored him. But astoundingly, unbelievably, none of us had ever told Sister. She was almost thirty years old and she still didn’t know that her biological father was Mom’s old boyfriend Charlie.

When Dad was interviewed by Mom’s collaborator for her memoir, he was put back on his heels to learn the extent of the unflattering things she had been saying about him. He realized that his relationships with his daughters had been poisoned since we were little girls, and he wanted to set the record straight. And he was particularly disturbed that Wynonna still didn’t know the truth about her paternity. Dad had always thought that Sister should be told, but he’d decided it was her mother