Loretta Lynn Spun the Blue Kentucky Girl Into Gold
I can’t give you an exact date, but it was in the mid-1990s on a warm summer afternoon in New York.
Rod Stewart and Loretta Lynn, neither a native New Yorker, were in town to do some publicity, and as it happened, both their agencies were in the same building. By further chance they happened to leave that building at the same time. It was likely a pleasant encounter, since Stewart admired Lynn’s work.
When they reached the street, a passing woman exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, look who it is! Can I get a picture with you?”
Stewart quickly replied, “No, I’m sorry. No pictures today, please.”
The woman looked puzzled. “Who are you?” she said. “I don’t want your picture. I want Loretta!”
Who says New Yorkers don’t know country music?
This brief vignette has a happy ending. Rod Stewart took a picture of Loretta Lynn with her delighted fan.
Loretta Lynn’s story had a happy ending, too. She died Tuesday at her home in her sleep, age 90. How many people wouldn’t take that deal?
And that was only the last note of Lynn’s happy ending.
As the world knows from the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter, she was raised during the Depression and the war years in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, a corner of Appalachia as hardscrabble as its name suggests. She was married at 15 and had the first of her six children at 16. Her husband Orville, or “Mooney,” liked to drink and was known to slap her around.
Mooney liked her singing, though, and he thought maybe people outside the Lynn kitchen might like it, too. He bought her a guitar, pushed her to perform on local stages and by 1960 had convinced her to make a record of a song she wrote, “Honky Tonk Girl.” It sold modestly, but caught the ears of the Wilburn Brothers, country artists who now had become producers. Lynn had also become pals with Patsy Cline, and collectively they got her to a major label, Decca, where the train started rolling.
Fast-forward a decade and Loretta Lynn is an icon of country music, part of a sentence that usually included Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton. Lynn had parlayed her writing, singing and performing into a platinum country music brand that would ultimately incorporate everything from a clothing line to a ranch/theme park built around one of the homes in which she and Mooney had lived. When you construct a replica of your childhood home on a corner of your adult estate, that’s a good indication you’ve made it.
Lynn got there the old-school way, making good music. Her only secret, she said in an interview several years later, was catchy melodies and songs to which the people with whom she grew up in Butcher Hollow could relate. Good plan.
The hard part was getting her chance in the first place, which required forcing the country music biz to scrap its figurative “No Gurlz Allowed” sign.
Over the first four decades of recorded country music, you can count on one hand the number of women who became stars. There were Sara and Maybelle Carter, Patsy Montana and Kitty Wells, with Patsy Cline on deck. That’s pretty much it.
It isn’t that listeners didn’t like women. Women country singers, often billed as cowgirls, were popular in hundreds of hometowns. The record industry just didn’t think they could sell records like Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell, so they were written off as local novelty acts.
Cline had a big role in changing that, and so did Loretta Lynn, because she proved there were more women coming along. That message finally started to penetrate in the 1960s with the likes of Parton, Wynette, Melba Montgomery, Skeeter Davis, Dottie West, Connie Smith and Jean Shepard.
Lynn, for her part, rolled out a string of songs that told down-home tales with humor, delivered in a voice that got your attention, but still lsounded like it was coming across your kitchen table, not from a soapbox.
One of the songs she wrote herself, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” spits nails in the folksiest of phrases: “Sometimes a man’s caught lookin’ at things that he don’t need / He took a second look at you but he’s in love with me.”
At the same time, she wasn’t letting that man skate. “Don’t Come Home A-Drinking (With Loving On Your Mind)” is pretty self-explanatory. More ominously, so is “When the Tingle Becomes a Chill.”
But if she wasn’t just taking whatever came down the road, she also admitted the emptiness of going without. “Somebody somewhere,” she sang, “don’t know what he’s missing tonight.”
While Lynn didn’t write most of her hits, she and her main producer Owen Bradley had a remarkable ear for what would constitute a Lynn song. If she was ultimately best known for high-spirited tunes like “The Pill” or “Your Squaw Is On The Warpath,” her repertoire also had room for a lovely traditional ballad like Johnny Mullins’s “Blue Kentucky Girl.”
She recorded 50 albums worth of songs, and a few syllables were all you ever needed to identify pretty much any one of them as Loretta Lynn.
Yet as country music came to love her — in 1972 she became the first woman to win the CMA Entertainer of the Year award, and she was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 — her early struggle to get her foot in the door turned out to be only her first battle with the industry.
In 1977 she scored her 16th №1 song, “Out of My Head and Back in My Bed,” and there was no reason to think she would not keep rolling. She was in her mid-40s, singing as powerfully as ever, the twang intact, still finding or writing Loretta Lynn songs.
Over the next 40 years, during which time she kept recording solid material, she only cracked the country top-10 four times. None went to №1.
This time it wasn’t gender. It was age. The industry decided to move on from the artists who created the golden era of the 1960s, so not just Lynn, but George Jones, Merle Haggard and dozens of others were flicked off the playlists of country radio.
“It’s terrible,” Lynn said in a 1990s interview. “You have all these great artists who are still making great music, and they can’t get it played. It’s very frustrating.”
This was a door she never did kick open. She made some fine music in those years and many fewer people heard it.
She endured other storms as well. Mooney died in 1996 and two of her children predeceased her. She also developed a reputation years ago for contracting physical maladies like pneumonia that caused her to postpone concerts and other events. Ronee Blakeley’s beloved but troubled Barbara Jean character in the 1975 movie Nashville was widely thought to have been based on Lynn.
Lynn brushed the comparison off, not denying she had health issues, but declaring that if it were really based on her, Barbara Jean would have always bounced back.
There’s no doubt Loretta Lynn did, just as there’s no doubt that wherever the music business went, she stayed faithful in her own music to tradition-rooted country.
It sounds simple. It wasn’t. It was only easy for the rest of us. Just ask Rod Stewart.
