It seemed like the perfect end to an era. Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek, and her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, played by Tommy Lee Jones, driving away in their Jeep CJ before the backdrop of a Tennessee sunset. Cue the final number.
The movie, 1980’s Coal Miner’s Daughter, would go on to win Spacek a Best Actress Oscar and many other awards, effectively launching the starlet’s career. Yet its success, and Spacek’s powerful performance, were in no small way due to the memorable qualities of the woman she portrayed—the same qualities that have allowed Lynn herself to stay relevant throughout a 40-year career in the fast-changing music business.
“Besides being an amazing talent, the thing that’s most disarming about Loretta is there’s no pretense at all about her,” Spacek, an Albemarle resident, tells
C-VILLE as Lynn’s historic engagement at the Charlottesville Pavilion approaches on Saturday, July 30. “What you see is what you get and that’s rare, particularly in the entertainment industry, that someone is not trying to be anyone but who they are. And it’s incredibly refreshing.”
While more than 15 years of performing had made Loretta Lynn a celebrity by the end of the 1970s, Coal Miner’s Daughter, based on her best-selling autobiography, made her a national icon. Telling how the 13-year-old naïf from Butcher Holler, Kentucky, became a tour-bus a-ridin’, Grand-Ole-Opry a-singin’, big-hair a-wearin’, bona fide superstar, the movie encapsulated not only Lynn’s life, but that of an entire generation of Nashville-based musicians. In a time when “Funkytown” reigned supreme, Loretta Lynn led the country charge back into the cultural Zeitgeist.
After her 1982 hit “I Lie,” Lynn, however, all but vanished from the public eye. She began to focus on her family, looking after Doo, who died in 1996, and carving out her legacy by way of a memorabilia museum at her ranch, a tourist attraction in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, complete with a RV park and “simulated coal mine.” Though she received her share of “lifetime achievement” awards, by the time of 2000’s “Country in My Genes,” Lynn’s first solo single in a decade, it seemed there wasn’t much room for the “Queen of Country” in the era of Britney and Shania.
So when the indie garage band The White Stripes hit it big in 2001 with their CD White Blood Cells dedicated to Lynn (having visited Hurricane Mills after cutting the record in Memphis), anyone reading the liner notes may have reacted with an ironic smirk or a perplexed scratch of the head. Some might even have thought the Detroit duo was eulogizing the faded symbol of Nashville’s golden days. Then something unexpected happened—Lynn sent them a thank-you note and an invitation to the ranch, where band members Jack and Meg White feasted on Loretta’s homemade chicken and dumplings. They, in turn, invited her to share the bill at a show in New York. Not long after, singer Jack White signed on to produce Loretta Lynn’s next album. And though many old-school country music followers may have been shocked to see one of their own cavorting with the 20something rocker, for Spacek, at least, such a bold move was typical Loretta. “She just follows her instincts and her instincts are so incredible,” says Spacek. “That was a decision that a lot of people wouldn’t have had the courage to make.”
Boasting 27 No. 1 hits by the 1980s, with hundreds of new songs report-edly scrawled on paper throughout her home, perhaps Lynn didn’t need White’s audience or his street cred to make the resulting album, Van Lear Rose, a success. Trends may come and go, but trailblazers like the “Honky Tonk Girl” are the real deal, says Afton-based roots musician Terri Allard. “Many of us have always been aware that they’ve been there, and I just think that the rest of the world’s been getting smarter…radio and record labels are just getting smarter,” says Allard, who became a country fan after first hearing Lynn hits like “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).”
Jack White would likely agree. If Lynn represented something to him, the symbolism stretched deeper than the image of a septuagenarian entertainer ripe for one last moment on stage. For his part, White told magazines like Rolling Stone that he viewed Lynn as “the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century.” White, in turn, became an ideal composite for Lynn. By joining her on vocals for “Portland, Oregon,” which won a Grammy for “Best Country Collaboration with Vocals” (Lynn also took home the prize for “Best Country Album of the Year”), White filled in for Lynn’s longtime duet partner, Conway Twitty, who died in 1993. In encouraging Lynn to dig out her original material, White was her Doolittle too—even acting the part of her lover with an eyebrow-raising, mouth-to-mouth kiss in the “Portland, Oregon” music video. Finally, in the eyes of the mainstream media, White played the role of Rick Rubin to Loretta’s Johnny Cash.
Between 1996 and his death in 2003, Cash had succeeded in overcoming the fast pace and fleeting tastes of modern country to release some of his most universally acclaimed material on the independent American Records label. It was Rubin, co-founder of hip hop label Def Jam and later a hard-rock producer, who teamed with the country legend on the four so-called American Recordings, channeling Cash’s creative vitality in unprecedented directions. Many writers and critics found irresistible the temptation to compare the two crossover comebacks. In naming Loretta Lynn to its 2004 “Cool List,” Spin magazine wrote: “On her recent album…Lynn sings a song about a betrayed housewife waiting to go to the electric chair for murdering her husband (‘Women’s Prison’). This makes her the female Johnny Cash. Or Johnny Cash the male Loretta Lynn.”
In fact, though equally shunned by Nashville’s Music Row, Cash always had a rebellious streak in him—he famously ran a full-page ad in Billboard following his 1998 Grammy win, in which he gave the city’s music establishment the middle finger—while Lynn spent much of her career within that system. Cash fixed his imagination on the outlaw hero riding trains, locked away in prisons, or standing on the gallows. Lynn’s rebellion came in subtler
ways through the songs she wrote. Her figures were drawn from her own experience, cleverly confronting real-life issues like divorce in “Rated X,” motherhood—Lynn has six kids—in “One’s On the Way” and “Pregnant Again,” and sex, in songs such as “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “The Pill.”
Producers Rubin and White also influenced the artists differently. Rubin was aware that his project with the ailing Cash might well be the Man In Black’s last. Their mission was to archive as many great songs as Cash could record, bound together simply by the power of the legendary figure singing them. White’s project, on the other hand, was not to catalogue the individual, but to rediscover the essential qualities of Lynn’s music by stripping the varnish of 30 years of overproduction. Just as Rubin encouraged Cash to experiment with different types of music, from old Gospel standards to Nine Inch Nails, U2 and Soundgarden, White sought to make an album that was 100 percent Loretta, relying on a single take in most cases, using an eight-track recorder. “Her voice has the same power and clarity it did when she was a young woman, which is proven on this new album,” says Spacek. “They just took a lot of first takes. It was 1, 2, 3, go. And she was able to able to do that. It’s rare that singers’ voices aren’t punched in and overdubbed.”
White’s assemblage of session musicians, The Do Whatevers, abandoned the niche “country” image of Loretta and injected that same one-of-a-kind purity she sings with back into the music. Lynn’s brilliance on the album comes from “the authenticity of her perspective,” says Live Arts Artistic Director John Gibson, a Loretta connoisseur who estimates to have seen Coal Miner’s Daughter about 40 times (his organization is the beneficiary of specially priced fundraiser tickets to Lynn’s show). “One of the things about Shakespeare is that he found the universal in the commonplace, in the ordinary, in everything,” says Gibson. “Loretta Lynn does the same thing.”
The 13 tracks penned by Lynn on Van Lear Rose all sparkle without any trace of flashiness. Her signature twang in songs about two-timing men (“Family Tree”) and growing up in the hills of Butcher Holler (“Story Of My Life”) hearkens back to her early days. Yet, her vocal delivery reaches its peak on numbers like the bluesy “Have Mercy.”
“She’s a sex bomb! I mean, it’s like a stripper number,” says Gibson. “It’s down and dirty and growling.” (That’s a far cry from the cornpone innocent in Coal Miner’s Daughter who didn’t know what “horny” meant until she was in her 20s.)
The cover photograph for Van Lear Rose hints at yet another side of Loretta. Only the Western-style acoustic guitar with her name written on the neck, which stands propped in her hand, suggests anything of Lynn’s performer status. Wearing a blue gown with her torso seemingly exposed, she is a regular Scarlett O’Hara, at once defiant and decadent, frail and rugged, “a beauty to behold like a diamond in the coal,” as she sings in the album’s title track, a tribute to her mother. In essence, Jack White’s Loretta Lynn embodies a vintage coolness that, like an old vinyl record packed away in a trunk, needed only to be unlocked.
Wherever Lynn’s cool factor comes from, though, Allard, for one, hopes White’s presence is introducing Lynn’s music to listeners who wouldn’t otherwise have been turned on. “I think it was a really cool move that has wonderful results,” she says. “There are so many things you can say about Loretta Lynn’s career. I think it says that she’s just as cool as I always thought she was.”
One thing is for sure—Loretta Lynn’s music has the power to make strange bedfellows. As Van Lear Rose exploded on the charts, two of Charlottesville’s cultural heavyweights, Starr Hill Presents and Live Arts, came together with the idea of bringing Lynn to town. Amid scattered concerns and a lot of speculation, developer Coran Capshaw was advancing his plans for the new Charlottesville Pavilion, and needed to find the right A-lister to launch the venue. For Live Arts, which in the ’90s hosted then-living legend Ray Charles, a Loretta Lynn performance seemed the fitting choice to celebrate its 15th anniversary. After all, Coal Miner’s Daughter was celebrating its 25th anniversary and it just so happened that Spacek is on the organization’s advisory board. Capshaw, too, had a long history as a Live Arts benefactor, says Gibson. “Coran wanted to do something special for us on this big birthday.”
Half the cost of each $125 to $250 “Premium Donor” ticket makes a tax-deductible donation to Live Arts. Prior to the July 30 performance, Live Arts will also hold a reception for ticket holders at the $250 level with Spacek as hostess. At 8pm, the actress will take the stage at The Pavilion to introduce Lynn, whose band also includes twin daughters Patsy and Peggy, professionally known as The Lynns. For Gibson, the performance will signify the start of a new cultural era in Charlottesville.
“That’s one of the things that’s most remarkable about the growth in Charlottesville over the last decade or so. We can pull this off now,” he says. “I see it as a mark of having arrived.”
Spacek is equally excited about the chance to see her old pal and about the opportunities for future mega-performances at local venues. “I’m just gonna be there and enjoy the party and get to see Loretta and introduce her to my hometown,” she says. “And as far as other friends, I think things are gonna change a lot with this amphitheater…I’m just gonna wait with bated breath and see who comes.”