Kitty Wells

Ellen Muriel Deason , known professionally as Kitty Wells, was an American pioneering female country music singer. She broke down a female barrier in country music with her 1952 hit recording, It Wasnt God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels which also made her the first female country singer to top the U.S. country charts, and turned her into the first female country star. Her Tophits continued until the mid1960s, inspiring a long list of female country singers who came to prominence in the 1960s.

Wells was born Ellen Muriel Deason in 1919, one of six siblings, to Charles Cary Deason and his wife, Myrtle, in Nashville, Tennessee. She began singing as a child, learning guitar from her father, who was a brakeman on the Tennessee Central Railroad. Her father, Charles, and his brother were musicians and her mother, Myrtle, was a gospel singer. As a teenager, she sang with her sisters, who performed under the name the Deason Sisters on a local radio station beginning in 1936.

Source: Wikipedia