Despite his drinking and womanizing, Mr. Lynn was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement after moving from Kentucky to Custer, Washington in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she could sing, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine with lyrics and chords for the latest jukebox hits.
“I fought back”
Mr. Lin continued to control his wife’s career, insisting on performing on honky tonks and radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical talent. He wasn’t superior, but he was as much a father figure as a wife. He used the term “spanking” her to describe the number of times he hit her. When the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, where Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline, she began standing up to her husband.
“Life got better after I met Patsy because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. I was 3,000 miles away from my mother and father and had four small children and there was nothing I could do, but later when things weren’t right I wanted to speak my mind. became.”
Ms. Lin’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first movement of the modern women’s movement. Although she declined the feminist tag in interviews, many of her songs, including her 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” were fierce expressions of a woman’s determination. In that song she sang:
Well, I don’t want to paint the walls, but I’ll give my opinion.
From now on, I’ll be your lover forever 50-50
Until now, I was a thing to please you.
Times have changed and I want satisfaction too.
Ms. Lynn’s sexual politics had already been emphasized in “The Pill” (1975), an exuberant celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHung, and TD Bayless. Such a candid record, and “Rated X” about the double standards faced by divorced women, would have been a far cry from the conservative country audiences of her music, if not tempered by Ms. Lynn’s playful lyrics. may not have been so popular. In her 1972 US No. 1 “Rated X,” she wrote: