“Loretta Lynn writes and sings.” The blunt, uncritical words were not only the title of her 1970 album, but typified what made her a giant of American music. It was also concise.
Lynn, who died Tuesday at the age of 90, spoke for no one and was her own. She created an archetype that spoke to the heart of country music and far beyond. Her songs were brief, silly, and so well-written that they sounded like conversations, even though they were in decent rhyme. In each of her three-minute vignettes, she sketched a realistic version of the life she knew and understood, refusing to be pretty.
Lynn was the daughter of a coal miner who continued to draw in Kentucky and remembers growing up poor in the Butcher Horror. She was a faithful wife, but she was no doormat. Based on her 48 years of turbulent marriage beginning in her teens desire, cheating, heartache, and righteous revenge.With anger and just a touch of humor, she set hard boundaries for both her husband and would-be rivals on songs like “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” ‘Your Squaw Is on the Warpath’, ‘Fist City’, ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough’.
In a 2016 New York Times interview when I visited her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, she told me: pain. ”
In the 1970s, Lynn chose to write songs that frankly and realistically resented the drudgery of parenthood, such as “Ones on the Way” (written by Shel Silverstein) and “The Pill.” . “pill” — With a narrator who compares himself to a hen and proclaims, “You set this chicken last / ‘Cause now I’m on the pill.” broadcaster, but reached the top ten in the country anyway.
“I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” Lynn said. esquire interview I was the first person to stand there and say what I think, what life is. The rest were afraid.
Lynn’s candor, along with the homely details that make her songs incredible, have been a cornerstone of country songwriting over the past half-century. A name from a list that could number in the hundreds.
Her voice helped make her songs unforgettable. The traditions of Appalachia, where Lynn grew up, remained in her music. She wrote songs in the form of her familiar waltzes, ballads, and honky tonk her shuffles. As a singer, Lynn applied what she had learned from the twang and vibrato of Kitty Wells and the fiery intensity of Patsy Cline to her own voice. One moment you blurt out something the next.
She was mostly comical in a duet with Conway Twitty. “It’s your fault that my kids are ugly” And she was able to open up her voice to wrestle with Jack White’s electric guitar on the 2004 collaborative album Van Lear Rose. Yet her more subtle moments were just as eye-catching.
her 1969 single “Wings on your horn” Sung by an “innocent country girl” who has been seduced and betrayed, it is layered with then-controversial religious imagery and has a gentle midtempo backup. But Lynn’s vocals make every line a tangle of conflicting emotions. “You called me your wife,” she sings, plummeting downward violently to her “her wife.” She sings “You turned flames into flames”, making the fire almost visible with “flame” upward leaps and “flame” tremors. sounds natural.
Lynn enjoyed her most successful period in the 1960s and 1980s, as her life story was revealed in the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter, an adaptation of her 1976 book. As mainstream countries moved away from Lynn’s lean traditionalism and into arena-scale productions, she’s been touring for decades and gaining new fans for generations. rice field.
In recent years, Lynn has embarked on new recordings with Johnny’s son, John Carter Cash, revisiting her catalog and writing new songs.before she releases “Still Woman Enough” In 2021, her voice dropped a bit and became somewhat grainy.