This day in 1991, Dottie West died at the age of 58 as a result of injuries she sustained five days earlier in a car accident. As the first female country GRAMMY winner, Dottie was considered by many as a trailblazer for female country performers.

Born Dorothy Marie Marsh on October 11, 1932, Dottie West, along with her friends and fellow recording artists Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, is considered one of the genre’s most influential and groundbreaking female artists. Dottie West’s career started in the 1960s, with her Top 10 hit, “Here Comes My Baby Back Again”, which won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance in 1965, the first female in Country Music to receive a Grammy.

In the late-70s, she teamed up with country pop superstar, Kenny Rogers for a series of duets which took her career to new highs, earning Platinum selling albums and No. 1 records for the very first time.

Her duet recordings with Rogers, “Every Time Two Fools Collide”, “All I Ever Need Is You”, and “What Are We Doin’ in Love”, became country music standards. In the mid-1970s, her image and music underwent a metamorphosis, bringing her to the very peak of her popularity as a solo act, and reaching #1 on her own for the first time in 1980 with “A Lesson in Leavin'”. In 2018, West was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.