Naomi Judd: 'It's scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so together side'

Naomi Judd thought she understood the ties that bind country-music stars and their audience -- then one aggressive fan went and joined the Pentecostal church the Judd family called home.

"It really burdened me," said Judd, after signing hundreds of her "Love Can Build a Bridge" memoir back in 1993. "I just don't sign autographs at church. The best way I can explain it to children … is to say, 'Honey, Jesus is the star.' "

After a year of this tense standoff, Judd became concerned and wrote the fan. "I said, 'I want you to really get away by yourself and read this letter and answer this question honestly: Do you come to church to see The Judds or do you come to church to see God?' She never came back to church. But she was in the autograph line today."

Through it all, Judd and her brash daughter Wynonna have talked openly about their triumphs and their struggles. Many fans identified with their failures just as much as the messages about faith and family.

At the time of that 1993 interview, Naomi Judd had battled through waves of anxiety attacks to address some dark realities -- such as rape, crisis pregnancy and her deadly battle with hepatitis C that retired the The Judds.

What she hadn't discussed at that time was the sexual abuse in her childhood that led to treatment-resistant depression. Judd's April 30th death, at age 76, focused new attention on blunt passages in her 2016 book "River of Time," in which she said had been tempted by suicide. "I wanted to be completely honest that if someone took out a gun and killed me on stage, they would be doing me a favor," she wrote.

The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame the day after Naomi's death and her shaken daughter Ashley Judd told the crowd, "I'm sorry that she couldn't hang on until today." Writing in USA Today, the actress expressed gratitude for her mother's legacy, but added: "Perhaps it's indecorous to say, but my heart is filled with something else, too. Incandescent rage. Because my mother was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl."

Naomi Judd: Press reports covered the dark nights of her life, but not the Sunday mornings

Journalists tend to remember symbolic details from many of interesting interviews — whether they are with superstars of various kinds or ordinary people who have seen remarkable things.

Exhausted after signing hundreds of copies of her “Love Can Build a Bridge” memoir back in 1993, Naomi Judd retreated to her tour bus parked behind the bookstore. She apologized for heading to the back room to get out of one of her famous stage dresses and into something from her farm outside of Nashville. The ground rules: no photos, but all questions were fair game.

At point in her life, she had already talked about some dark days and nights — from rape to a crisis pregnancy and beyond. But she hadn’t dug deeper into her childhood and the abuse that created the deep pools of depression that would eventually take her life.

But this was a woman who was driven to talk about her angels, as well as her demons. My favorite quote from that interview didn’t make it into the “On Religion” column that I wrote pre-Internet, but stashed deep in my file cabinets with pages of notes and transcripts.

Naomi Judd stressed that if people — journalists included — want to understand country music, and the relationship between the musicians and their fans, they need to remember that it’s normal, in a country music show, “to sing about Sunday morning, as well as Friday and Saturday nights.”

That’s what I went looking for in the coverage of her death and then the ceremony in which The Judds — Wynonna and Naomi — entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. Here’s the top of the Nashville Tennessean report on that event, as it ran in USA Today:

As Grammy-winning duo The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame Sunday evening, Wynonna Judd addressed the passing of her mother Naomi just one day earlier.
Following brief remarks from her younger sister Ashley, Wynonna spoke for roughly four minutes.
"It's a strange dynamic to be this broken and this blessed. … But though my heart is broken, I will continue to sing," she said.
Wynonna said Naomi Judd, 76, passed away at 2:20 PM, and that she kissed her mother "on the forehead and walked away." She also stated that the last act she, Ashley and unnamed other family members did together was praying the Bible's 23rd Psalm. The crowd in attendance all recited the Psalm in unison with Judd to complete her speech.

That’s solid and hints at the atmosphere during the ceremony.

Truth is, Hall of Fame member Ricky Skaggs — who knew the Judds from the days before their rise to fame — took the audience to church, as he struggled to control his emotions through the entire speech-sermon.