Dottie West (born Dorothy Marie Marsh; October 11, 1932 –
September 4, 1991) was an American country music singer and songwriter Her
career started in the 1960s, with her Top 10 hit, "Here Comes My Baby Back
Again", which won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal
Performance in 1965, the first female in Country Music to receive a Grammy. She
was
known as the Country Sunshine girl after writing and recording a song of
that title for a Coca Cola commercial.
The oldest of ten children, she was born just outside of
McMinnville, Tennessee. After her abusive, alcoholic father was imprisoned, her
mother opened a small cafe. Dottie began appearing on local radio just shy of
her 13th birthday, and went on to study music at Tennessee Tech, where she also
sang in a band and met her future husband, Bill West, whom she married in
1953.
When he took a job in Cleveland,
Ohio, Dottie landed a singing slot on that city’s Landmark Jubilee TV show as
half of the Kay-Dots duo with Kathy Dee (Kathy Dearth, 1933-68).
On weekends the Wests would drive to Nashville to
cultivate music industry contacts. Dottie successfully auditioned for Starday in
1959, but little came of the affiliation. In 1961 the couple moved to Music
City. West signed with Atlantic, but fared no better than she had at Starday. While
at Nashville. she and her husband fell in with a group of aspiring songwriters
like Willie Nelson, Roger
Miller, Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard. They also
became close friends with Patsy Cline and her husband Charlie Dick.
Dottie landed a publishing deal and a new record contract
with Atlantic. The songwriting initially proved more profitable, when Jim
Reeves took her song Is This Me? into the charts in 1963. That led to an RCA
contract, and working with Chet Atkins, Dottie’s tear in her voice style was
soon heard extensively on country radio initially with her first Top 40 country
hit in 1963 with Let Me Off At The Corner, followed a year later by the Top Ten
Love Is No Excuse, a duet with Jim Reeves.
The self-penned Here Comes My Baby also became a top ten
hit as Dottie West became the first female country artist to win a Grammy Award
in 1965 leading to an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry. She enjoyed
further top ten hits with Would You Still Hold It Against Me and Paper
Mansions, while equally impressive singles such as Reno, What’s Come Over My
Baby, Like A Fool and Country Girl only just scraped into the top twenty.
Shortly after that success, she left RCA and signed with
United Artists and also changed her image, becoming one very sexy lady with her
glorious red hair and provocative outfits. She had parted from Bill West, and
in 1972 married drummer Bryan Metcalf, who was a dozen years her junior.
Suddenly, her image underwent a huge metamorphosis. As the sexual revolution
peaked, so did Dottie West’s career. Her material became far more provocative
and, much to the chagrin of country purists, more commercially successful as
well.
She was paired with Kenny Rogers for a series of
chart-topping duet hits (Everytime Two Fools Collide, All I Ever Need Is You,
What Are We Doin’ In Love, etc) and scored a number one hit in her own right
with A Lesson In Leavin’ in 1980. This was her most successful period and her
daughter Shelly West also became a major country act, both as a solo and in a
duet partnership with David Frizzell, while Dottie made the front pages and the
centre-spreads of the tabloids in revealing poses.
In 1983 she married her sound engineer, Al Winters, who
was 23 years her junior. By this time her career was suddenly on the rocks. She
moved across to the small independent Permian Records, but failed to score any
more major chart hits after a top 20 duet of Together Again with Kenny Rogers
in 1984. She became caught up in a tragic spiral of disasters. Hooked on drugs
and booze, she reached an all-time low in 1990 when following her divorce from
Winters, her manager sued her and the bank foreclosed on her house. She lost
her car, declared bankruptcy and when the IRS held a public auction so they
could recover $1 million in back taxes, all her life souvenirs were sold off.
For a time she lived in a parking lot on her tour bus, but even that had to be
sold.
In 2018, West was posthumously inducted into the Country
Music Hall of Fame
