The abrupt dissolution of Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert’s marriage rocked the country music world on Monday because the pair have utterly dominated the industry ever since they became engaged in 2010, racking up awards brass, album sales and magazine covers galore. In the past four years, Shelton has evolved into something of a jovial country music ambassador for the Hollywood crowd. He became the standout “coach” of NBC’s The Voice, where he often ribbed co-star Adam Levine and encouraged his Nashville-bound contestants to perform songs recorded by his wife.
Meanwhile, Lambert has spread her wings as country’s resident spitfire, taking her witty perspective, tender introspection and saucy lyrics to the top of the country charts. In an industry particularly unfriendly to female artists, Lambert has taken her perch as an A-list woman (alongside her Somethin’ Bad duet partner Carrie Underwood) very seriously. Together, they were the king and queen of the Nashville prom, but alas, they’re now headed in separate directions.
Before she was ever linked to Shelton, Lambert was most famous for her angry breakup anthems. “I’ve given up on love/Love’s given up on me,” she sang on Kerosene, a song literally about burning down an ex’s house. “Baby, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” she said about an unhinged bar brawl on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Lambert’s sass has softened considerably since she married Shelton, though her newest album’s standout track Priscilla, with a chorus that reads, “Priscilla, Priscilla/How’d you keep him to yourself?/Between the whistle calls and the southern dolls/It’s enough to put a home through hell,” sure sounds a whole lot less playful today than it did a year ago. Thus, it’s hard not to consider, and even hope, that she might channel some of her trademark break-up angst on a future album, even if that’s a rather ghoulish thought.
Shelton has lately thrived on making broadly appealing and bland music, occasionally dabbling in bro-country with tracks like Boys Round Here, which featured Lambert’s group the Pistol Annies on background vocals, and Sure Be Cool if You Did. But whether he’ll choose to dig deeper in future releases remains to be seen. Shelton is no doubt capable of mining deep subjects, as he proved with Over You, a song about his brother’s death, which he co-wrote with Lambert and asked her to record. Her version subsequently became a career-defining smash. The fate of that song will be particularly interesting to trace in the next months and years. Will Lambert keep performing a ballad about her ex-husband’s late brother? That sounds like a uniquely painful pursuit.
I’ve been talking primarily about Blake and Miranda’s individual singles thus far because, unlike many of the most famous country couples of yesteryear, they never released material together. Still, they often performed with one another on stage, and they in fact met while taping CMT’s 100 Greatest Duets concert in 2005. The undeniably electric clip of them singing David Frizzell and Shelly West’s You’re the Reason God Make Oklahoma together became a central part of both their professional narratives in the years that ensued, and that makes perfect sense. There’s something so risky, romantic, and profoundly intriguing about watching two famous artists singing about love. The stakes feel high because personal affections become publicly consumable commodities. Even if romance doesn’t last, the resulting music does, and so it’s understandable that a couple wouldn’t want to double down on recording duets. Still, such songs are a longstanding tradition in country music, and they’ve provided some of the genre’s most palpably passionate moments.
Johnny and June Carter Cash are undoubtedly the most famous couple in Nashville’s storied history, and their relationship led to some of country music’s most famous songs. June Carter penned Ring of Fire about falling in love with Johnny while he was an unstable addict married to another woman, and he later made the song a legend with his own rendition. The two got married in 1968 and stayed married until their deaths in 2003, and their career’s worth duets were always charming to watch as Johnny acted all brash and brooding, while June Carter knew how to take him down a peg or seven. Most famous has always been their duet Jackson, which has stood the test of time – and then immortalized for a new generation of country fans in the 2005 film Walk the Line.
George Jones and Tammy Wynette also had quite the famous relationship, and they recorded many beloved songs with one another like We’re Gonna Hold On, though their six years of marriage from 1969-1975. Their marriage ended in a bitter and very public divorce amid accusations of Jones physically assaulting Wynette, but public interest in the couple remained so intense that Epic Records released a new collection of previously recorded songs called Golden Ring. The title track of that album became the former-couple’s most popular and enduring song with a chorus about a rejected piece of jewelry that reflected the couple’s real-life trajectory: “It’s just a cold metallic thing/Only love can make a golden wedding ring.”
In more recent years, country couples’ songs haven’t been nearly as foreboding as Golden Ring. Clint Black and wife Lisa Hartman’s duet When I Said I Do, released in 1999, is an earnest romantic ballad about commitment, and the couple has fittingly remained together since marrying in 1991. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s It’s Your Love strikes a similar tone – and it’s struck a chord with listeners since 1997. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Tim and Faith are also one of the best-looking pairings in any realm of the celebrity sphere.)
Put simply, passion makes for great music. Moments of love and moments of pain yield powerful art, and it’s a privilege that country fans get to enjoy music that has resulted from private moments in both marriage and divorce.
