The country music world is mourning a legend. Naomi Judd, one half of iconic duo The Judds and mom to singing partner Wynonna and actress Ashley Judd, has died. She was 76.
Her famous daughters announced the sad news on Saturday in a statement on Ashley’s Instagram page.
“Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness. 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,” the post read.
Further details have yet to be confirmed.
The Judds were set to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday and they recently announced their final tour planned to kick off later this year, their first in a decade, and they just appeared together at the 2022 CMT Music Awards earlier this month.
The mother-daughter pair had 14 No. 1 hits across three decades and won five Grammys. They initially called it quits after Naomi’s hepatitis diagnosis in 1991 and later reunited.
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View GalleryIn addition to Wynonna and Ashley, Naomi is survived by her husband, Larry Strickland, a former backup singer for Elvis Presley.
Back in 2017, the musician reflected on her journey with depression and sharing her experience in a personal memoir “River of Time,” telling Access Hollywood that she wanted her book to be a “survival guide” for those facing similar issues and to hopefully help break the stigma surrounding mental illness.
“It’s so stinking hard to describe, my depression is because even though there’s 43 million of us, there’s all these other people who will say some ridiculous idiotic stuff like we’ll just snap out of it, you’re having a bad day, pull yourself out of it and you just want to b*** slap them,” Naomi said. “It’s like you don’t know, you have no clue until you’ve actually been there and gone through it, just how serious this is.”
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