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K.T. Oslin, the first female songwriter to win the Song of the Year CMA Award for her 1987 hit “80’s Ladies,” died at 78 on Monday. According to her friend, the journalist Robert K. Oermann, who confirmed her death, Oslin had been fighting Parkinson’s illness and was diagnosed with Covid-19 last week.
Born to Kay Toinette Oslin in Arkansas, Oslin was 45 when she released her top country debut album, Ladies 1987, a remarkable feat for a woman in country music and almost impossible today. The LP included a pair of country Number Ones in “Do Ya” and “I’ll Always Come Back” along with the Top 10 title track. But it was the nostalgic “80’s Ladies” ballad—a trio of girls who “burned our bras… dinners… and our candles at both ends”—that became her signature. “These ladies haven’t tried a lot,” Oslin sang.
“In 2011, Oslin told CMT, “I wrote a little piece at a time. “It was an idea that I had. I thought it was going to be a great song to perform live in concert. It’s one of those show pieces, I thought. I never had a dream or thought it was going to be a single one.
80s Ladies’ won Oslin, the sole composer of the song, the 1988 CMA Song of the Year Award, making history as the first woman to win the award in the process.” Oslin was also named Female Vocalist of the Year at that same ceremony.”For her 80’s Ladies performance, she would go on to win the Grammy Award and win two more Grammys for ‘Hold Me,’ which hit number one in 1989.”A year later, her fourth and final chart-topper, “Come Next Monday,” arrived.
Oslin had her songs recorded by an array of artists alongside her career as a solo performer. In 1983, “Where Is a Woman to Go” was released by Dottie West in 1984, and “Old Pictures” was recorded by the Judds in 1987. Sissy Spacek cut “Lonely But Only for You” Oslin’s material was also interpreted by Anne Murray, Dusty Springfield, and Dan Seals. Oslin would continue to influence a crop of modern songwriters, including Brandy Clark, who remembered her as “Larger than life, smart, funny, elegant, beautiful… the list could go on and on” in a Twitter thread.
I’ll never forget the night that I opened for Mike Reid at the Franklin Theater in 2013. My friend Robert Filhart asked if he could bring someone backstage. I didn’t know that that someone was KT Oslin until she blew through the door with him like something out of a movie. pic.twitter.com/JmPLJcR7bx
— Brandy Clark (@TheBrandyClark) December 21, 2020
Oslin stopped touring regularly in the early 1990s and began his career as an actor, appearing in TV series and making-for-TV movies. She released her biggest hit album in 1993, the title of which summed up the self-assured way she saw growing old: Songs From an Aging Sex Bomb. In 2013, she told the Nashville Scene, “We’re supposed to have music for all of us,” Music isn’t just 20-year-old.”
Oslin would have made occasional appearances on stage and released more music, including the American effort My Roots Are Showing in 1996. And the 2001 collaboration with Maverick’s Raul Malo, Live Close By, Visit Often. Her last album was Simply, 2015. In 2018, Oslin was introduced to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
