Latest news with #StandbyYourMan
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
I had a bitter divorce with my ex-husband. I didn't expect his new wife to become one of my best friends years later.
When my ex-husband began dating, I wanted to meet the woman who would be spending time with my kids. Despite some initial coparenting challenges, we bonded over shared experiences and family ties. Now she's one of my closest friends, someone I can depend on in good times and bad. Patti has become one of my closest friends. We go to shows, crawfish boils, and out to eat. We show up at family parties arm-in-arm, and most recently celebrated her daughter's college graduation together. It's a beautiful friendship — one I never expected to have with my ex-husband's wife. I remember the day I met Patti. I'd invited her to lunch after learning my ex-husband was dating her. I wanted to get to know the woman who might become my kids' stepmother and, truth be told, I was feeling a little guilty about the impending divorce. My husband and I had been married for 12 years and had five kids within the first five years. We didn't really communicate much at all. He was a good provider and a great father, but we were more parenting partners than lovers. I eventually began searching for affection and companionship outside of marriage. He eventually discovered the truth and moved out. We coparented amicably at first, even taking turns staying in the family home to provide stability for our children. It was heartbreaking to see the hurt I'd caused, both to the children and to my ex-husband. I think I subconsciously felt it was my mission to help him find happiness again. When I heard he was dating Patti, I wanted to meet her. We had a great meal and conversation at a local Mexican restaurant with me admitting to my shortcomings as a wife and building him up as a husband. I was trying to be both an honorable ex and used car salesman that night. But I did like her and she left with my blessing if they decided to get married. Not long after, they did get married. It was just a couple of months after I had gotten remarried myself. And then it all went south. After the divorce, coparenting became difficult. We fought over custody, family land, and more. By the time the details were worked out, we were so angry with each other that our handoffs had to take place in public. On top of that, my ex-husband and my new husband seemed to hate each other, making communication tough. Through it all, Patti and I were stuck in the middle, with all communication taking place solely between us. No longer friendly, it was cordial at best as we collectively personified Tammy Wynette's song, "Stand by Your Man." With age comes wisdom, though, and we eventually realized blind loyalty to men was overrated. Girl power took its place and over the years we started talking on the phone, bonding over the now-grown kids' antics, our new roles as grandmother, and the ordeals of living with grumpy old men. This started while I was living out of state and Patti was living less than five miles from my parents. She started to take care of them like they were her own. Many people actually thought she was a third sister, not realizing her husband was actually an ex son-in-law. When my second marriage was ending, Patti was one of the first people I turned to. She had been there at the end, listening as I weighed out my decisions and offering her support. She, of all people, knew the struggles we'd had. My ex-husband, who I'd regained a friendship with by then as well, was also supportive. While Patti had always been at family birthday parties and holiday events, our friendship grew even stronger in recent years. She's just like any of my other girlfriends, and has taken me to drop my car off at the mechanic, while I've picked up stuff at the store for her. I know I can count on her when I need to and she can do the same for me. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
27-05-2025
- General
- Business Insider
I had a bitter divorce with my ex-husband. I didn't expect his new wife to become one of my best friends years later.
When my ex-husband began dating, I wanted to meet the woman who would be spending time with my kids. Despite some initial coparenting challenges, we bonded over shared experiences and family ties. Now she's one of my closest friends, someone I can depend on in good times and bad. Patti has become one of my closest friends. We go to shows, crawfish boils, and out to eat. We show up at family parties arm-in-arm, and most recently celebrated her daughter's college graduation together. It's a beautiful friendship — one I never expected to have with my ex-husband's wife. I made the first move I remember the day I met Patti. I'd invited her to lunch after learning my ex-husband was dating her. I wanted to get to know the woman who might become my kids' stepmother and, truth be told, I was feeling a little guilty about the impending divorce. My husband and I had been married for 12 years and had five kids within the first five years. We didn't really communicate much at all. He was a good provider and a great father, but we were more parenting partners than lovers. I eventually began searching for affection and companionship outside of marriage. He eventually discovered the truth and moved out. We coparented amicably at first, even taking turns staying in the family home to provide stability for our children. It was heartbreaking to see the hurt I'd caused, both to the children and to my ex-husband. I think I subconsciously felt it was my mission to help him find happiness again. When I heard he was dating Patti, I wanted to meet her. We had a great meal and conversation at a local Mexican restaurant with me admitting to my shortcomings as a wife and building him up as a husband. I was trying to be both an honorable ex and used car salesman that night. But I did like her and she left with my blessing if they decided to get married. Not long after, they did get married. It was just a couple of months after I had gotten remarried myself. And then it all went south. Coparenting nearly broke us After the divorce, coparenting became difficult. We fought over custody, family land, and more. By the time the details were worked out, we were so angry with each other that our handoffs had to take place in public. On top of that, my ex-husband and my new husband seemed to hate each other, making communication tough. Through it all, Patti and I were stuck in the middle, with all communication taking place solely between us. No longer friendly, it was cordial at best as we collectively personified Tammy Wynette's song, "Stand by Your Man." The women took a stand With age comes wisdom, though, and we eventually realized blind loyalty to men was overrated. Girl power took its place and over the years we started talking on the phone, bonding over the now-grown kids' antics, our new roles as grandmother, and the ordeals of living with grumpy old men. This started while I was living out of state and Patti was living less than five miles from my parents. She started to take care of them like they were her own. Many people actually thought she was a third sister, not realizing her husband was actually an ex son-in-law. My relationship with my ex came around, too When my second marriage was ending, Patti was one of the first people I turned to. She had been there at the end, listening as I weighed out my decisions and offering her support. She, of all people, knew the struggles we'd had. My ex-husband, who I'd regained a friendship with by then as well, was also supportive. While Patti had always been at family birthday parties and holiday events, our friendship grew even stronger in recent years. She's just like any of my other girlfriends, and has taken me to drop my car off at the mechanic, while I've picked up stuff at the store for her. I know I can count on her when I need to and she can do the same for me.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The best, worst and cringiest of Stagecoach Day 1
Less than a week after Coachella concluded, the Stagecoach country-music festival has drawn another crowd in the tens of thousands to the now mostly grassless Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. The three-day event kicked off Friday and will run through Sunday night with headliners Zach Bryan, Jelly Roll and Luke Combs. I'll be here all weekend to bring you the highs and the lows as they happen. Here's what went down on Day 1: Three years after he made his Stagecoach debut in 2022, Zach Bryan returned to headline the festival's first night with a jumbo-sized performance in which he and a band of more than a dozen players ran through roughly 30 songs (and in the process blew way past his scheduled curfew ). The music was ragged but soulful, and as at every Bryan gig, it inspired folks in the crowd to scream his lyrics into each other's faces. Wearing what he said was the same sleeveless Indian Motorcycles T-shirt he wore last time at Stagecoach — 'I thought it was cute,' he said — Bryan thanked the audience profusely, which felt inevitably like a bit of damage control after his ex-girlfriend, podcaster Brianna Chickenfry, went public last year with accusations that he had been emotionally abusive. (Bryan didn't directly respond but wrote on Instagram that he was "unphased by the fake s— people say about me online.") But if his career seemed in danger just a few months ago, nothing about his reception here suggested that the enthusiasm about him has cooled. He even got away with doing a rollicking version of Warren Zevon's 'Lawyers, Guns and Money,' which he called his favorite song of all time — and which hardly anybody on the field seemed to know. The headline out of Lana Del Rey's set — which came as she's been teasing the release of a purported country album that may or may not drop next month — is that she once made out with Morgan Wallen, at least if the lyrics of one of her rootsy new songs are to believed. 'I kissed Morgan Wallen / I guess kissing me kind of went to his head,' she sang over strummy acoustic guitar (after telling the audience that this would be the last time she'd ever sing the lines), 'If you want my secret to success / I suggest don't go ATVing with him when you're out west.' OK! Let's not let that bombshell keep us from savoring some of the other peculiarities of this song, which evidently is called '57.5' after the number of monthly Spotify listeners Del Rey once had — 'I got 57.5 million listeners on Spotify,' she sang — and which also had her revealing that she talks to Jesus, hates everybody and still flies commercial. 'You need an autograph?' she sang with a little shrug. 'S—, I don't mind.' Performing on a set made up to look like the porch of a backwoods country cabin, Del Rey debuted a couple of other new tunes, including one that appears to be about her alligator-boat captain of a husband, and one that fans online are calling 'Quiet in the South.' She covered Tammy Wynette's 'Stand by Your Man' and John Denver's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,' and she brought out the up-and-coming country hunk George Birge to do his 'Cowboy Songs.' She also sang lightly countrified versions of 'Video Games' and 'Summertime Sadness' that made you think about how durable Del Rey's fame has been over the past decade and change even as she's taken every available opportunity to test its bounds. Maybe that's why. How often do you shampoo your hair? T.J. Osborne: Never. John Osborne: Never? T.J.: Never. John: Wow. I'm once a week. How many unread text messages do you have? John: Six. And two unread emails. I try to keep it below 10. Does anyone besides you know the passcode to your phone? John: My wife. I don't know the passcode to hers, though. T.J.: Anybody that's partied at my house and they're like, "What's the passcode? Gotta change the music." I'm like, "OK, here you go." You don't have to say with whom, but are you currently involved in a beef with anyone in music? T.J.: Oh, always. Would you rather be 10% more talented or 10% better looking? John: I've got plenty of talent. Name a country song you wish you could sing but you know you can't. John: Pretty much any Chris Stapleton song. T.J.: Or Vince Gill. 'Go Rest High on That Mountain' — it just needs that high tenor. What's an adult beverage you've sworn off? T.J.: No cinnamon drinks. Fireball, Goldschläger, any cinnamon schnapps — won't do it. What's the last thing you used ChatGPT for? John: If you come in last in our fantasy football league, you have to do open-mic stand-up comedy. And I was nearly in last place, so I used it to help write jokes. It was so bad. ChatGPT is amazing — but a horrible comedian. Did you come in last? John: Fortunately, I didn't have to use the jokes. T.J.: The guy who did lose, one of our friends got on a Facebook group for the area we live in and told everyone that Nate Bargatze was gonna do a pop-up to get more strangers to come watch him. Wearing bedazzled headphones to match the rest of her super-sparkly outfit, Paris Hilton took all of about eight seconds to bludgeon the crowd inside Diplo's HonkyTonk with 'We Found Love' by Rihanna and Calvin Harris, which she mixed into Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' to open an almost charmingly obvious DJ set. Later, Hilton brought out Lizzo and the two shouted along to Icona Pop's 'I Love It.' Carter Faith, teeing up her feisty new single, 'Grudge': 'This song's about a stupid bitch that pissed me off.' Tucker Wetmore performed on the main stage in front of a digital mock-up of an old-timey saloon complete with a mounted deer head, several American flags — and a sign advertising the canned vodka seltzer sponsoring his summer tour. Womp-womp. No one has been more visible on the polo grounds this month than T-Pain, who after playing both weekends of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival capped Stagecoach Day 1 with a late-night set in the Palomino tent. The veteran R&B star said he initially had his doubts that he'd be welcomed by a country crowd when Jelly Roll brought him out for a surprise appearance at last year's Stagecoach: 'These people don't wanna hear my s—,' he said he told Jelly Roll. Yet here, as at Coachella, his hits went over like the classics they are. Paying forward Jelly's favor, as he put it, T-Pain brought out another country outsider in Kesha, who joined him to do their new single, 'Yippee-Ki-Yay,' which unfortunately is very bad. Just days after Winston Marshall published an essay in the Free Press about abandoning what he views as an immoral music industry, Marshall's old bandmates in Mumford & Sons put in a last-minute appearance at Stagecoach that drew a gargantuan crowd to the Palomino. Did everybody but me know that Mumford & Sons was still this big? Would you rather drive or be driven? Drive. I get very car sick. What's the last thing you cooked? Spaghetti squash. How often do you shampoo your hair? Every day. I'm that person — I know it's wrong. Would you rather be 10% more talented or 10% better looking? Ten percent better looking, for sure. Name a country song you wish you could sing but you know you can't. Martina McBride, 'Independence Day.' She just belts on a level I don't belt. What's an adult beverage you've sworn off? Beer. A go-to indulgence? Designer handbags. You have a tattoo you regret? I have a rainbow butterfly on my foot that I got to match all the colors in my outfits when I was 16. Now it's a little trashy. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Independent
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Candi Staton: ‘I told him, If you kill me, you'll die too'
In an upstairs lounge at Hackney Picturehouse, Candi Staton is reflecting on the documentary that has just premiered on screen one. The American singer, a vivacious and very much active octogenarian, is one of the stars of the British-made I'll Take You There: Discovering the Sound of Alabama, and the evening's guest of honour. 'It is amazing,' she says, beaming, of this late-in-life recognition that's brought her to London. 'Years ago, when I was in my thirties, my forties, my fifties, people said: 'God is saving the best for the last. Your last days will be your better days. Just be patient…' So I always kept a mental positive attitude, and I kept those things in mind.' Staton's career may have got off to a glittering start, but this battle-hardened soul survivor spent much of her middle years languishing in the doldrums. From the late 1960s to mid-1970s, she had been a towering figure in Black American music, dubbed the First Lady of Southern Soul and acclaimed for her R&B covers of 'Stand by Your Man' (a huge American hit in 1971) and 'In the Ghetto' (a hit in 1972). Her 1976 single 'Young Hearts Run Free' was a disco-era smash. But in 1982, at the age of 42, Staton – who'd been a functioning alcoholic – went sober and became a born-again Christian. Her conversion prompted a long run of gospel-only albums, none of which her fans wanted to hear. As she pithily puts it of her live shows during that period, 'People are not saying: 'Oh, I love you!' They're saying: 'Get off the stage! We came to hear 'Stand by Your Man'! We don't want to hear the rest of that mess!'' In the 1990s, however, the wheel turned once more when one of her mid-Eighties tracks, 'You Got the Love', became a dance-floor favourite. More recently, she's made a series of Americana-flavoured albums that fuse her love of soul, country, gospel and R&B and which have brought a newfound lease of creative life – and adoration – well past retirement age. This most recent musical pivot is another reason for her trip from her home in Georgia: the International Lifetime Achievement gong that, when we meet at the start of this year, she is set to receive at the UK Americana Music Awards, which took place in late January. In short, Staton – 85 years young next month and radiant in great-grandma bling (designer leather, Gucci loafers, bejewelled jeans, diamond-ringed fingers) – is now a bone fide musical icon. Nowhere is that more apparent in I'll Take You There. It's a sprawling film that takes in Alabama's status as a cradle of southern soul; the development of the legendary Fame recording studios in Muscle Shoals; this corner of the South's importance to the c ivil rights movement; and the resonance of all these historical currents to an awestruck bunch of visiting UK Americana artists, who include Michele Stodart of The Magic Numbers and Bristolian singer-songwriter Lady Nade. The connective tissue? Staton – a defiantly positive woman who thinks 'everybody goes through the same things [in life]'. So, from the personal to the political, she still heeds the creed contained in the lyrics of her biggest song. 'America's messed up right now. And I do feel like throwing my hands up in the air, saying, Lord, I don't care. But you got the love I need to see me through.' The woman born Canzetta Staton has lived an extraordinary life, featuring five ex-husbands, several career stops and starts, plus that alcoholism-to-born-again-Christianity through line. Hers is a story of both personal trauma and 20th-century racial injustice, and it only makes her richly soulful music all the more emotionally impactful. Nowhere is this more the case than on her new album, Back to My Roots, a collection of covers and originals billed as the sound of the singer 'return[ing] to her southern ways' and which features the spoken word track '1963'. That title refers to the events of 15 September 1963 – the day the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. By chance, Staton, a young mother married to the son of a preacher man, was also in Birmingham that day at another church service run by her father-in-law. 'We had just finished praise and worship and prayer, and the deacon came through the door and said: 'Get out of here everybody! They're rioting! They just bombed 16th Street Baptist Church. Four little girls got killed!'' she recalls. 'They had targeted that church rather than ours because that one sometimes held civil rights [meetings] and Martin Luther King would often preach there [although not on that occasion].' On '1963' she relays the rest of that 'horrible' afternoon, when she and her two young sons had to escape Birmingham through the shattered downtown. 'Oh what a sight to see, I'll never forget it... People running, people cursing, people screaming, people crying, trying to get to safety … We made it through the crowd unharmed…' she declaims, her barely stifled tears audible on the recording. 'When will this madness ever end?' Staton then takes purposeful care to name and honour the victims: Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Carol Denise McNair (11). In I'll Take You There, we see a visibly stilled Staton visiting the 16th Street Baptist Church, along with Stodart and Lady Nade. She never met Dr King, nor saw him preach, because her first father-in-law 'didn't believe' in the civil rights movement. 'He was like, let sleeping dogs lie.' Yet she herself had always been energised by the fight for racial justice, thanks to her experience as a teenage musician criss-crossing the South in the era of segregation. 'I had experienced the horror of being on the road and seeing how [we were treated],' she says. Staton's extraordinary career began when she was 11, when she and her older sister Maggie were sent from their home in small-town Alabama to a religious school, the Jewell Christian Academy, in Nashville. The girls' singing abilities were noticed by a pastor and, paired with another pupil, they were turned into the Jewell Gospel Trio and sent out on the road, the better to spread the school's Christian mission – and earn it money. She duly spent her tweens and teens 'going to all these cities, playing with all these big artists – Mahalia Jackson, The Blind Boys of Alabama and everybody – in all these big auditoriums'. Yet it was also a time in which she and fellow artists such as Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls were forced to travel in 'caravans' of vehicles for strength in numbers, parking up for the night in tight formation, or rushing for the safety of Black-friendly 'safe houses' before darkness fell. She recounts the story of touring with a 'male quartet out of Nashville – you don't have to name them, because I don't want to embarrass the family … During those days, men had their hair permed. At night, to keep the waves in place, they wore head rags.' Motoring through Alabama one night, the convoy was stopped by police. 'They were shining their flashlights in the cars. And [the police officer] saw their head rags, said the n-word and then: 'Are you women or men? What you women doing with a moustache and beard?'' They ordered the gospel quartet of the car and commanded them to sing. Then they wanted to know if they danced, too. On being told no, the four police officers drew their guns. 'Well, you gonna dance tonight.' Staton pauses, eyes shining. 'They started shooting up their feet, and they were trying to dodge the bullets. That's an experience I'll never forget. I was 14, 15.' The police started shooting up their feet, and they were trying to dodge the bullets A year later her time on the road came to an end. When she was 16, she discovered that the Jewell Gospel Trio's fellow Chitlin' Circuit stalwarts The Staples Singers were being paid – and allowed to keep what they were paid. 'I got to thinking: we don't get fed, we don't get paid, we don't have any clothes, we wear robes ... They are using us,' she says of the trio's elders and alleged betters at the Jewell Christian Academy. So, aged 17 she quit the road and went home to her mother in the 'little country town' of Hanceville. It was a 'culture shock' after all that touring, a place of 'no cars, kerosene lamps … I didn't know that Muscle Shoals was only 60 miles north,' she says of the home of Fame. 'Look at fate, it's amazing,' she marvels. But at the time, her abiding feeling was: 'This is the pits! I know too much! I've seen too much! I've been around the world! And I got to settle for this?' It was not long after this that she met her first husband. 'This guy pulls up in this '57 Chevy – and he was flashy!' she continues, beaming. 'He liked me, so I started dating him, and I ended up getting pregnant... So I married him, but I wasn't happy. He kept me forever pregnant for seven years – I had four children by the age of 27.' One of them, 'my baby girl Cassandra', 58, is here with Staton on this London trip, hovering nearby. (Not along for the ride are the grandchildren, who number 'about 20', and the 21 great-grandchildren.) That relationship ended in divorce in 1968. Not long after that she embarked on a new relationship. She accuses the man involved of extreme coercive control and of using a date rape drug against her. 'He said 'Before I leave, let me fix you some breakfast…' He brings the coffee back, I drink the coffee, and God be my witness, I don't remember nothing after that. He put something in [the coffee].' Whenever she used to tell that story, she says, no one would believe her. 'They thought I was lying – until P Diddy came out,' she says, referring to allegations – which Sean Combs denies – that the hip hop mogul drugged and sexually assaulted women. 'My doctor told me what it was – it was a rape drug.' She also says she was 'forced to stay with him for three years, and I was scared to death every day'. The nadir came during a five-date residency at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, where she was supporting Ray Charles. Enraged by her absence on the final night, she says the man dragged her up to their suite. 'He put a gun to my head and [threatened] to kill me right there. He picked me up and had hanging over the [balcony] and said: 'If you sneeze, if you cough, whatever, I'll drop you and you'll splatter like egg.' I was like: 'God, is this the day I die? You're gonna have to help me get out of this one.'' Inspiration, divine or otherwise, struck. 'I just started talking to him,' she says of a partner she can't bring herself to fully name. 'I said: 'You know the Aladdin is owned by the mafia, right? If you kill me, you'll die too. They're not going to let you out of Vegas. They will blow you into pieces.' He started thinking, and he pulled me back in. 'All right, I won't throw you out the window, but I'm gonna kill you anyway...' And you know what? I was so tired, disgusted and frustrated, I laid on the bed, clothes and all, and I went to bed with a gun pointing at my head.' The next day, 'we had to drive home like nothing ever happened. But I knew then I had to [get away].' Not long afterwards, she was recounting all this to David Crawford, a musician friend. He was, at the time, writing a song. It was called 'Young Hearts Run Free', 'and I didn't know that. But that's how that song was birthed.' That ostensibly feel-good dance anthem was based on Staton's story, turning her traumatic experiences into a euphoric-sounding survivor's anthem. Released in 1976, it became a foundational disco-era staple, with an epic long-tail – on Spotify alone it has almost 200 million plays. But I ask: how difficult is it for Staton to sing, to this day, the song, knowing that it comes from such a grievously painful place for her? 'Well, you have to release it,' she replies. 'You have to regurgitate some of that trauma somewhere. A lot of people don't understand emotional regurgitation. You gotta let it out. You can't hold it in. It'll kill you, give you cancer,' says a woman who was herself diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018. At least the story surrounding her other defining song is a happier one, albeit wild in its own way. Staton was originally asked to sing 'You Got the Love' as the theme song for, of all things, a 1980s fitness video about 'Big' Ron Hey's attempt to lose 700 pounds by following the 'slim-safe Bahamian diet' that was being promoted by American comedian Dick Gregory. When the film's producers baulked at her then-manager's request for a fee of $10,000 (£7,980), that manager – another ex-husband, but a decent one – said they'd settle for half the song's publishing royalties. 'And that song has made me!' she says of a track that has its own money-spinning afterlife. It was originally released in 1986, but a 1991 remix of 'You Got The Love' was a No 4 hit in the UK and another remix, in 1996, reached No 3. Then, via Florence & The Machine's cover on her debut album Lungs (2009), the dance-floor staple became a Top Five hit all over again. 'I'm retired now,' says a smiling Staton, this week's activity in London – and her jetlag-defying stamina this evening – belying that assertion. 'I can sing if I want to, or I can stay at home for the rest of my life because the cheques keep coming in.' What relationship does she have with Florence Welch's version of her song? 'Well, at first it made me mad. Because we had just did that arrangement. We put three versions together, and it took us three days to do it. And Florence, obviously, was at Glastonbury,' she asserts of the 2008 festival appearance where Staton unveiled the new version. 'And she recorded it just like we had arranged it. And my band was livid. 'This is crazy! We just worked on that song!' She did it just like I did it on stage [after] we had worked it up. 'But then I got to thinking, and I love her for it now. Because she made me money, from the publishing. So I'm like: 'Go, girl! You do your thing.' I don't care no more, ha ha!' If anyone deserves a happy – not to mention lucrative – ending, it's Candi Staton.
