Tamara Faye Messner was an American evangelist, singer, author, talk show host, and television personality. She gained notice for her work with The PTL Club, a televangelist program she co-founded with her husband Jim Bakker in 1974.
They had hosted their own puppet show series for local programming in the early 1960s; Messner also had a career as a recording artist. In 1978, she and Bakker built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park.
Messner garnered significant publicity when Jim Bakker was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on numerous counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989, resulting in the dissolution of The PTL Club.
She released three autobiographies during her lifetime, I Gotta Be Me in 1978, Tammy: Telling it My Way in 1996 and I Will Survive and You Will Too! in 2003.
Tammy Faye Children: Who Are Tammy Sue Bakker and Jay Bakker?
The Bakkers married on April 1, 1961, and left college to become itinerant evangelists. They had two children, Tammy Sue “Sissy” Bakker Chapman (born March 2, 1970) and Jamie Charles “Jay” Bakker (born December 18, 1975).
Jamie “Jay” Charles Bakker is Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker’s younger child. Like his sister, he also followed in his parent’s footsteps, studying to become a pastor and co-founding the liberal ministry, Revolution Church, in 1994.
Like his sister, Jay has had a hard time dealing with the consequences of his parents’ scandals. He told Vanity Fair that he has “always been in therapy” as a result of the public scrutiny he and his family have endured.
Jay has taken steps to take control of his narrative, including publishing a memoir in 2001, entitled “Son of a Preacher Man,” in which he shares with readers the experience of growing up in the spotlight and enduring the demise of his parents’ empire, according to The Cinemaholic.
When Tammy Faye Bakker’s daughter, Tammy Sue, remembers her mom, she remembers her singing. Not the singing that the bubbly televangelist performed during her popular Christmas specials or on her dozens of albums. It’s the way she’d sing around the house.
“She sang differently when we were at home than when she did live or when being recorded,” Tammy Sue Bakker told TODAY. “I loved hearing that voice. It was almost like this 1940s gorgeous thing that she would do, and I would beg her (to) please record that.