Naomi Judd, the Grammy-winning vocalist formerly known as Naomi Joins who was a member of country music duo the Judds alongside Wynonna Judd, has died at the age of 76.
On Saturday, outside Nashville, Judd died, according to her representative. Her children also informed the Associated Press about her passing.
“Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness,” the statement said. “We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public. We are in unknown territory.”
Judd’s cause of death has not been revealed. Additional information on Judd’s death is pending.
Judd made her name as part of a singing duet with her daughter Wynonna, achieving 14 number-one country music singles in the 1980s and 1990s. They called it quits in 1993, shortly after Naomi was diagnosed with hepatitis, but they reunited several times for various performances and multiple reunion tours. In addition, the two have been seen together multiple times this year, most recently at the CMT Music Awards where they performed their first TV performance in 20 years and announced a tour dubbed The Final Tour would start this September. Next month, the Judds will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Naomi Judd was born in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1946. Growing up in a middle-class family, Naomi Judd eloped with her first husband and bore Wynonna (Christina Claire Ciminella) when she was 18 years old. Before divorcing in 1972, they had another daughter named Ashley. Naomi was left to raise the two girls as a single mother after that.
Naomi and Wynonna began singing together while their father, the elder Judd, was working as a nurse; after unsuccessfully attempting to gain Nashville’s attention, it is said that Judd managed to sign a recording contract through a producer whose kid she had cared for. The Judds debuted in 1984, with their first EP the following year. Over the next seven years, they released six albums. They won five Grammy Awards for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal for songs like “Mama He’s Crazy” and “Love Can Build a Bridge,” which are both popular.
“These Kentuckians modernized Appalachian front-porch singing with folk, country, blues, jazz, rock, and pop delivered with glove-tight harmony,” said Alanna Nash in a review of the Judds’ discography in 1992, telling that their first album, Why Not Me, “stood out on commercial country radio like a new Caddy on a road with battered pickups.”
The relationship between the mother and daughter would occasionally grow tense — they went without talking to each other on several occasions — but they would always return together, and at the time of Naomi’s death, they appeared to be on good terms.
“There’s so much stuff that gets entangled in the personal stuff, and you take it wrong, and you get upset, and then it gets bigger and worse, and it can really fester and become something. That’s absolutely not supposed to be,” stated the elder Judd last year.
Judd is survived by her husband, Larry Strickland, a performer who formerly backed Elvis Presley. She was also survived by two daughters and a granddaughter.
