Letters
Knit to This: Loretta Lynn
It seems like every five or six years, I run around blabbering about Loretta Lynn like no one’s ever heard of her and I’ve just checked my calendar: it’s that time again. Still Woman Enough, her brand-spankin’ new album of (mostly) revisited Lynn staples, turns out to be another reason for me to yammer my fool head off to anyone who’ll listen. Congratulations: this time it’s you!
You’ll know all but one song—the title tune, a 100% brand new throwdown stomp she wrestles to the barroom floor with Reba and Carrie (McEntire and Underwood … the singers, not the law firm)—though they’re not all songs you only know as Lynn classics. There’s a sweet, traditional “Keep on the Sunny Side” and a couple of other dusted-off standards (“My Old Kentucky Home” and “I Saw the Light”) that sound as clean and clear as they’ve ever sounded in anyone else’s hands.
There are some star-spangled guests as well—the aforementioned Reba and Carrie, as well as Margo Price and Tanya Tucker (both show up sounding like they’ve never been happier to do something in their lives). Everyone who’s anyone wants to sing along with Miss Loretta. I’m doing it right now!
Despite the giddy guest appearances, though, it’s Lynn’s low-key return visit to her most famous song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” that brought me up short. It’s the sort of thing that would make me roll my eyes a little if I just read about it, but hooo-boy (that’s gen-u-ine Loretta Lynn parlance, by the way) is it a killer. She simply recites the famous lyrics against a simple curtain of lightly-plucked banjo; she even de-emphasizes the rhymes, so it comes off like a perfect little two-minute short story and for about ten minutes after it’s over, you’ll swear it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard. It is.
In the MDK Shop
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I went to see her at the Tarrytown Music Hall – an amazing theater right next a yarn shop – and she was fantastic. Everything you expected and then some.
There was a recent Terry Gross/Fresh Air interview with Miss Loretta that I’d recommend to go along with this new CD.
Thank you. That was a beautiful way to start the weekend.
DG, I’m not even a country music fan, but you make me want to be. I always feel like you’re someone I want to sit down with for at least two cups of coffee and a long chat.
i was a teenager in the 60s, moved to the city in the 70s and was never not interested in country music. It’s not until I had my own children that I came to better appreciate how hard my father worked, as a coal miner.
I never did get into country music much but I did love Loretta Lynn’s song and still am proud to say I’m a coal miner’s daughter.
Thank you for this! If you love Loretta, I recommend listening to her audiobook, “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust: My Friendship with Patsy Cline”, read by her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell. Her daughter sounds just like her, and the story of her friendship with Patsy Cline is wonderful. One of my favorites.