The Judds

Book excerpt: Wynonna Judd has a smile like Elvis Presley’s, a voice comparable to Patsy Cline’s, and a vocal style that’s (almost) all her own. Onstage, she shares the music and the limelight with her Kentucky-born mother Naomi. Together, the Judds have become the hottest country-western duo singing today. They’ve brought country back to its roots with a rockabilly beat and helped bring Nashville renewed success as a music capital. Author Bob Millard traces the colorful lives of mother and daughter, from Naomi’s tragic loss of her brother in childhood, to her escape into early marriage, through the “U-Haul years” when Wynonna and her sister Ashley were toted through countless cities in search of their mother’s dream. Theirs is a wild, inspiring story of love and devotion, fights, reconciliations, and bald ambition. But most of all, it’s a story of finding harmonies—in music and in the women themselves.