Naomi Judd’s dark side
The country superstar was always exploring the shadow
Published in
12 min readMay 18, 2022
In 1984, a 38-year-old Kentucky nurse and her daughter hit it big as a country music duo. The Judds were the feel-good “Cinderella story” of the year.
It was an amazing act: a Baby Boomer mother and daughter who seemed to be the same age — as the mother was sexier. Naomi Judd shot herself to death on April 30, 2022. I’m trying to understand her difficult story.
She was born in Kentucky in 1946.
She’d describe her family’s history in Southern Gothic terms—as she put it, a “menagerie that was a tangled web of secret lives and hushed truth.” There was the usual mix of cold, rule-following Christians and closeted gays.
She’d always describe herself as Christian, if in a different, ecstatic way. In her 1993 memoir Love Can Build a Bridge, she writes:
“I often sensed that other people weren’t feeling God the same joyous way I was, and I didn’t think our preacher was telling us all we needed and wanted so badly to hear.”
