Wynonna Judd knew touring without her late mother would bring up a lot of feelings, but she didn’t know that it would also help her through the grief.
Judd’s mother, Naomi Judd, died by suicide on April 30 at age 76 after a long battle with mental illness.
Grammy-winning duo The Judds, consisting of Wynonna and Naomi, had planned their final tour before Naomi’s death, and Wynonna decided to continue it without her late mother.
“I have to admit, I’ve had an incredible, incredible opportunity to heal through all of this, to cry and to say things onstage that I’ll never say again,” Judd, 58, told The Hollywood Reporter.
“This is a whole other level of deep, and I wasn’t expecting it,” the singer-songwriter continued. “I knew it would be intense but this is literally, ‘Oh, my Lord.’ This is me with a broken heart being as open as I’ll probably ever be, and other people are responding to that in a way that I wasn’t expecting.”
The Judds were set to begin their final tour — their first in a decade — just weeks after Naomi passed.
Judd previously revealed that she “lost it” while rehearsing for the tour without her mother.
“It’s devastatingly beautiful to go back to the past and relive some of these memories,” she said in October. “Yesterday I was in rehearsal and there’s a part in the show where they sync up Mom singing with me. And I turned around and I just lost it.”
“The Judds: The Final Tour” was originally an 11-date tour that kicked off in October — but now she’s added a 13-date second leg that will kick off Jan. 26 and feature special guests such as Tanya Tucker, Little Big Town, Brandi Carlile, Martina McBride, Ashley McBryde and Kelsea Ballerini.
Judd admitted that it was an extremely easy decision to extend the tour as it has been an “amazing healing experience.”
“It healed me. It really did. It healed me, and I didn’t expect that. I really went out with a full heart for the fans and a broken one for my personal experience,” she said of the tour.
“All of a sudden it just knocks you over because the support and the love was so strong at times, I actually had to sit down and people thought that maybe something perhaps was wrong, and it was just because it was so overwhelming,” she added. “It just knocked me on my butt, literally.”
She also shared that she expected the tour to be more of a “memorial” for her mom rather than be about the music.
The live shows are being filmed for a documentary, which has helped Judd realize just how many people resonate with her story.
“I’ve had people literally come up to me and say, ‘My mom committed suicide and I am here, and I’m feeling every word you say.’ And when they say that, I’m not sure what else to tell you, brother. It is intensely deep and personal,” she shared. “They’ve either lost their mother or something has happened in their family, and this is almost a 12-step meeting. This is not just show business. It’s helping a lot of people.”
While touring has helped Judd in her process of grieving, she still feels emotional after getting off stage.
“When you’re so brokenhearted that you can’t think straight, you do the next right thing, and the next right thing for me is often singing. And that’s what really gets me through,” she said. “And boy, oh boy, did I feel like I had guardian angels all around me. And it was very, very spiritual for me to the point where I would come off stage and it would take me hours and hours and hours to decompress.”