You're Looking at Country
You're Looking at Country
Loretta Lynn Championed a Forgotten America
Dear Wags,
Loretta Webb Lynn was from a part of America that generates a lot of hand-wringing. As her most famous song goes, she was born’d a coal miner’s daughter, in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler. Butcher Hollow is on the outskirts of the mining community of Van Lear, in Kentucky’s eastern mountains, a region of snaking roads, flood-prone creeks, and jerry-built houses backed up against slippery inclines. If you go looking for something like the heart of Appalachia, you may locate it in the neighborhood. The poverty rate in Johnson County, where Lynn spent a very lean childhood, hovers around 21 percent. Many places in Eastern Kentucky are much poorer, but the region’s most famous daughter put it on the map as a hardscrabble place, inhabited by tough people who go their own way.
Lynn’s story is perhaps the most famous in Country music, immortalized in the tune Coal Miner’s Daughter and her memoir of the same name, which was adapted into a 1980 film starring Sissy Spacek. The movie won 7 Oscars, including Best Actress and Best Picture. It also cemented the singer’s image as a survivor, a show business cliché that in her case, thoroughly applies. Her father died of black lung disease, and she wed moonshiner Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn at 15 (her autobiography put her bridal age at 13). At 24, she was plucking out songs on a $17 guitar while raising six kids with her husband, who masterminded her career. The pair were married for nearly a half-century, but he was an unfaithful and sometimes abusive alcoholic—“he never hit me that I didn’t hit him back twice,” she famously said. Her songs are full of harried women, hard-drinking, faithless men, and their knockdown drag-out scraps. They are also wickedly funny: You'll bite off more than you can chew/ If you get too cute or witty, she warns her man’s mistress in her 1968 hit “Fist City.” You better move your feet/If you don't wanna eat/A meal that's called fist city.
Most female performers of Lynn’s generation were confined to chaste romantic ballads, so her trailer park feistiness was a jolt. She was an outlaw, at the forefront of a revolution of singer-songwriters who rejected the industry’s sugar coating. Lynn came up playing juke joints and local radio stations in the timber towns of Washington State, where she and her family had moved in the 1950s. In 1960, she broke through with I’m a Honky Tonk Girl, and appearances on the Grand Ole Opry made her the best-selling female artist in Country music (Patsy Cline was her great friend and mentor). Unlike most of her Nashville peers, Lynn wrote many of her own hits, including 1966’s You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man), and 1967’s Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).
Lynn was never comfortable with the second-wave feminism that rose alongside her stardom, but her work unabashedly championed blue-collar women. Rated X (1972) dealt with divorce; One’s on the Way (1971), sent up beleaguered motherhood; The Pill (1975) celebrated birth control and got banned from radio stations. You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly (1978), one of 12 singles she recorded with Conway Twitty, was among a bushel of humorous marital laments. Devastated by her husband’s 1996 death, Lynn spent a few years out of the spotlight. A late-career resurgence included Van Lear Rose, her 2004 collaboration with Jack White, which won a Grammy award for Best Country Album. Her 50th and final studio album, 2021’s Still Woman Enough, included collaborations with Carrie Underwood, Reba McEntire, Tanya Tucker, and Margo Price.
Through it all, Lynn presented herself as a plain-spoken person, uninterested in slickly packaged celebrity. Her politics were not left-wing, but she was attuned to the troubles of working people dismissed by those much-vilified coastal elites. “When all those city folk try to fix up my talking, all they do is mess me up,” she said. There was a little artifice in this, but even at the height of her fame, Lynn stayed close to a good if troubled heartland. She wrote Dear Uncle Sam, one of the first songs to express anxieties about Vietnam, and championed the career of black Country star Charlie Pride. She performed for both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, and spoke approvingly of Donald Trump. In short, she was as complex and maddening as the country she loved.
If you lived in Lynn’s America, her songs had a way of cutting through politics and speaking to the real problems of people just squeaking by. Long before the media paid much attention to places like Johnson County, she sang of its broken families, thwarted women, and unbreakable spirit. In a positive and enduring sense, that made her a populist, determined to give such struggles a voice. Appalachia now makes the news because age-old poverty mixes with dangerous new forms of addiction. These are problems Lynn, who died at 90 at her home in Hurricane, Tenn., understood too well. “You get used to sadness, growing up in the mountains, I guess,” she wrote. Her genius was to take that pain and celebrate the humor and resilience in hard country lives. That, above all else, will be missed.
Questions for us at CultureWag? Please ping intern@culturewag.com, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy.
CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s an essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through a cluttered landscape and serving up smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. If somebody forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and RSVP “subscribe.” You’ll be part of the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, which still makes more than 300,000 delicious Sacher-Tortes a year.
“I can resist everything except the Wag.” —Oscar Wilde
