Melba Montgomery, one of the most distinctive country singers of her generation and an electrifying — and witty — duet partner for George Jones, Gene Pitney and Charlie Louvin, died on Wednesday in Nashville. She was 86.
The cause of her death, at a memory care facility, was complications of dementia, said her daughter, Jackie Chancey.
Ms. Montgomery was known to her fans and others as “the female George Jones” for her unreconstructedly down-home phrasing and her gift for bending notes in the tradition of her native Appalachia. Her thrilling high harmonies put an emotional charge into duets like “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” a Top 10 country hit she recorded with Mr. Jones in 1963.
As both a solo artist and a duet partner, Ms. Montgomery placed 30 singles on the country chart from 1963 to 1986. Her recording of “No Charge,” a touching ode to motherhood written by Harlan Howard, rose to No. 1 in 1974 and crossed over to the pop Top 40.
A handful of Ms. Montgomery’s other solo releases reached the country Top 40, notably “Angel of the Morning,” her 1977 rendition of Merilee Rush’s 1968 Top 10 pop hit. Her most consistent and enduring success, though, came with the songs she performed with others, beginning with “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” a cheating-gone-wrong song set to waltz-time rhythms that she wrote herself.
“I thought I loved another, not you/How foolish I thought the same, too,” Ms. Montgomery and Mr. Jones sang, trading lines while commiserating with each other as a Dobro guitar blubbered in the background.
The recording was Ms. Montgomery’s first to be marketed to a national audience.
“I was nervous as a cat!,” she was quoted as saying in “George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend” (1984), by Bob Allen. “Not only was it my first major session, but it was with George Jones!
“George had been out roaring the night before, and nobody even knew where he was until an hour before the session,” she continued. “When he finally showed up, he was in a really good mood, and the whole thing came off really well.”
Ms. Montgomery and Mr. Jones had an affinity for comic material about marital foibles. “Let’s Invite Them Over,” which they performed in close harmony style, is sung from the perspective of a couple who no longer love each other but have fallen in love with each other’s best friends.
The singer-songwriter John Prine included versions of both “Let’s Invite Them Over” and “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds” on “In Spite of Ourselves,” his 1999 collection of duets with various female country singers. Ms. Montgomery was Mr. Prine’s partner on “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds.” She also sang the woman’s part on “Milwaukee Here I Come,” another duet associated with Mr. Jones (he originally recorded it with Brenda Carter in 1968 and later with Tammy Wynette).
Ms. Montgomery had a country hit, “Baby Ain’t That Fine,” with the pop singer Gene Pitney in 1966 before releasing four Top 40 country duets with Mr. Louvin in the 1970s. Their first collaboration, “Something to Brag About,” reached the country Top 20; the song later made the country Top 10 in a rollicking version by Mary Kay Place, of the ’70s nighttime soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” with Willie Nelson.
Ms. Montgomery never earned accolades on a par with those bestowed on her contemporaries Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, although she had an equally commanding voice and influenced acclaimed country and bluegrass singers like Patty Loveless and Rhonda Vincent. Nevertheless, she always received high praise from Mr. Jones, the man widely regarded as the greatest country singer ever.
“Melba fit my style of singing more than Tammy did,” Mr. Jones explained, referring to Ms. Wynette, his ex-wife and duet partner, for Mr. Allen’s biography. “I hate to use the word ‘hard-core,’ but that’s what Melba is — a down-to-earth hard-core country singer.”
Melba Joyce Montgomery was born on Oct. 14, 1938, in Iron City, Tenn., one of nine children of Norman and Willie Annie Mae (Cypert) Montgomery. Her father was a sharecropper — and later, a knitting mill worker — who played fiddle and gave voice lessons at the local Methodist church.
Raised in Florence, Ala., young Melba learned to sing harmonies and play the banjo and guitar at home. She and two of her brothers, Carl and Earl, known as Peanut, also went on to become successful songwriters.
In 1958, when she was 20, Ms. Montgomery and her brothers entered a talent contest hosted by WSM, the radio station that broadcasts the Grand Ole Opry. One of the judges was the singer Roy Acuff, who, impressed by her forceful vocals, hired her to sing in his touring revue.
Four years later she signed with United Artists Records and was introduced to Mr. Jones, with whom she would go on to have six Top 40 country hits.
When the hits stopped coming in the 1990s, Ms. Montgomery focused her attention on songwriting. Her collaborations with a variety of other writers produced hit material for the likes of George Strait and Ms. Loveless.
She released her final album, “Things That Keep You Going” — her first in more than a decade — in 2010. She retired from performing in 2015, a year after the death of her husband of 46 years, Jack Solomon, who had previously been a member of Mr. Jones’s band.
In addition to her daughter Jackie and her brother Earl, Ms. Montgomery is survived by three other daughters, Tara Denise Solomon, Diana Lynn Cirigliano and Melissa Solomon Barrett; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Looking back over her career, Ms. Montgomery at times expressed misgivings over the extent to which her decade as a duet singer overshadowed her work as a solo artist.
Those doubts notwithstanding, Mr. Jones insisted that Ms. Montgomery had little cause for regret — and that, indeed, the two of them did as much as anyone to establish the now-ubiquitous male-female format in country music.
“I’m not saying Melba and I were the first to sing male-female duets in country music, because we weren’t,” Mr. Jones said in his 1996 autobiography, “I Lived to Tell It All,” written with Tom Carter.
“And I’m not saying we were the best. But Melba said recently that she thinks we popularized the male-female format, and I agree.”
