Naomi Judd is Alberta Hunter's story run backwards: the nursing came first, the fame came second, and it was the nursing that eventually ended the singing.
Nursing school with two children
She was born Diana Ellen Judd on January 11, 1946 in Ashland, Kentucky, was pregnant at seventeen, and was a single mother of two by her early twenties, moving between Kentucky, California and Tennessee and working whatever job was available.
She went to nursing school in her late twenties — at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, then at College of Marin in California — and qualified as a registered nurse in 1979.
She moved the family to Nashville and worked as an RN, largely in intensive care, while trying to get her elder daughter Wynonna heard by anybody in the music business. The often-told version is that she gave a demo tape to a producer whose daughter she had nursed on the unit.
The Judds
RCA signed the pair in 1983. Over the following eight years The Judds took five Grammys, nine Country Music Association awards and fourteen number one country singles, and were for a period the most successful duo in the genre.
Judd kept her nursing licence current.
Hepatitis C
In 1990 she was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C, contracted, on her own account and her doctors', from a needlestick injury on the intensive care unit in the early 1980s.
Hepatitis C had no name when she caught it — it was called non-A non-B hepatitis until 1989 — and no reliable test, no treatment, and no needlestick protocol worth the term. She was given three years to live.
She retired from touring in 1991, at the height of the act's success. The farewell tour ran through December of that year.
She survived it, treated eventually with interferon, and was in remission by the mid-1990s. She spent much of the following thirty years on hepatitis C awareness and on funding nursing scholarships, and returned to occasional performance and to television.
Judd died on April 30, 2022 in Tennessee, at 76, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a long history of severe depression, which she had spoken and written about publicly for years. The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame the following day.
Why she is on this list
Two reasons beyond the biography.
Hers is one of the few well-documented cases of a famous person whose career was ended by an occupational injury sustained at the bedside — bloodborne exposure, which is the specific risk that produced the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of 2000, nineteen years after she was stuck.
And she talked about the depression while she was still in it, at a point when very few people in country music or in nursing were willing to.
Related
Sources
- Naomi Judd, for the chronology, her nursing training and the hepatitis C diagnosis. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Love Can Build a Bridge, Naomi Judd, 1993. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Naomi Judd, of Grammy-winning duo The Judds, dies at 76. Associated Press, April 30, 2022. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act, Public Law 106-430, 2000. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Accessed September 9, 2026.