Ruby Wright

b. 27 October 1939, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The eldest of the three children of Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright, she sang with her parents from an early age. At the age of 13, she was signed by RCA Records and under the production of Chet Atkins, she had single releases as Ruby Wells (there was a pop singer called Ruby Wright, but no doubt RCA believed it would help to use her mother’s stage name). In the mid-50s, she was a member of a close-harmony female singing trio, Nita, Rita and Ruby (Nita was Anita Carter and Rita was Rita Robbins, the sister of Marty Robbins’ guitarist and yodeller, Don Winters). Working with Atkins, they leaned heavily towards a pop presentation but were backed by country studio musicians, and they had minor success with numbers such as ‘Rock Love’ and ‘Hi De Ank Tum’. They were basically only a recording act, since family touring made live appearances difficult for Nita and Ruby. Rita never conquered her stage fright; the trio broke up and she retired. Ruby began to sing with her sister, Carol Sue Wright, as the Wright Sisters, recording (again with Atkins) for Cadence Records, who saw them as a female version of the label’s popular Everly Brothers. In 1964, she had a Top 15 solo US country and minor pop hit with ‘Dern Ya’, a female answer song to Roger Miller’s ‘Dang Me’. In the late 60s, she made the country chart with her Epic label recordings of ‘A New Place To Hang Your Hat’ and ‘(I Can Find) A Better Deal Than That’. During the 1970s, she recorded for several small labels including Plantation and Scorpion and had some success with ‘Yester-me, Yester-you, Yesterday’. She continued to appear with her parents’ show but in the 1980s, along with her sister Carol Sue, took to running the family Museum and Tourist attraction in Nashville.
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