She might not be a household name but Jean Shepard was a pioneer for women in country music, with a staggering 73 singles in the country chart between 1953 and 1981.

What I love about YouTube is not just those chance discoveries, but finding comments when you do from either the artist themselves or, more often, members of their family.

Such is the case with this cheesy video of the largely forgotten honky-tonk singer Jean Shepard, complete with some yodelling at the end.

It’s a classic country tune with a typically punning title – Second Fiddle (To An Old Guitar) – about a gal being neglected by her husband, who prefers strumming his gee-tar to takin’ care of her.

I had assumed the man in the video was her real-life husband, fellow musician Hawkshaw Hawkins, but that’s impossible because this song was released in April 1964 and he died in March 1963 – in the same plane crash that killed Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas.

Shepard came to fame following the trailblazing Kitty Wells’s breakthrough for women with It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels in 1952.

A Dear John Letter, a duet between Shepard (singing) and Ferlin Husky (who spoke his part) about a soldier in the Korean War, topped the country charts and became the first song by a female country artist to sell a million copies since WWII.

This is the song that marked Jean’s comeback following Hawkshaw’s death and the birth, one month later, of their son Hawkshaw Jr.