Crown & country
On her follow-up to 2018’s Wouldn’t It Be Great, the C&W queen celebrates the gals.
Loretta Lynn ★★★★ Still Woman Enough LEGACY. CD/DL/LP
THE PHOTO on the front sleeve has her sitting on a velvet throne: the queen of country, all spangles and brocade. There’s a tiara hooped over one ornate arm of the chair, her guitar leans against the other, and the look on her face is of someone who has business to do. And knows how to do it: this is Loretta Lynn’s 50th studio album. Within days of its release, she’ll be 89 years old. But age – judging by the clear, strong voice and spot-on band on these 13 songs – has not withered her. A coal miner’s daughter, married at 15, six kids, a grandmother at 34, she’s made of steely stuff.
Loretta is – like Willie Nelson, one year her junior – equal parts accomplishment and endurance; a flagship of classic country music, a link to its rural, working-class roots, the writer of countless songs that have become part of country’s lexicon, and a star who’s taken her own path while operating within the system, never backing down.
What Loretta Lynn did was write frank and honest songs about being a woman. Sometimes so frank and honest (like Rated X or The Pill) they were banned by country radio. She sang what women were thinking and she was the first, she said, “to ever go into Nashville, singing like the women lived it.”
The idea behind this new album – recorded once again at Johnny Cash’s old studio, Cash Cabin, with Cash’s son John Carter Cash and Loretta’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell co-producing – was, she explains, to celebrate country music made by women, with women. “I am just so thankful to have some of my friends join me on my new album. We girl singers gotta stick together.”
The “girl singers” include Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, Suzi Ragsdale, Margo Price and Tanya Tucker. They do a fine job (extra applause to Price in One’s On The Way and Tucker on the title track) – but this is not another tribute-to-Loretta album, it’s Lynn’s show, and she and the band are on fine form. They’re Lynn’s songs, too, for more than half the tracks. The selections date right back to her debut single Honky Tonk Girl – a rendition so good you can smell the beer – and Coal Miner’s Daughter, her signature song, whose words she recites, like an autobiographical poem, over a slow, sparse, moody banjo.
She doesn’t revisit the banned songs. The rest of the album is made up of traditional and old country songs that men wrote, and she covered. Among the best: a lovely take on Stephen Foster’s Old Kentucky Home; a warm, churchy sing-along of Hank Williams’ I Saw The Light; and Keep On The Sunny Side, an upbeat homage to the first lady of country music, Mother Maybelle Carter.