Loretta Lynn’s New Album, and the Trail She Blazed in Country Music

The key figures in Loretta Lynn’s early artistic development were just as often women as they were men.Photograph by Douglas Mason / Getty

Loretta Lynn once dreamed of putting together an all-woman backing band, called the Lynettes. But it never happened. “It was that old double standard again,” she explains in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the memoir, published in 1976, that she named after her signature song. “People started saying you can’t have a traveling girl band—if you had one incident, people would start gossiping about it.” She adds, “But an all-girl band would have been fantastic.” Instead, she hired an all-male band and called them the Coal Miners.

Lynn routinely rejects the label of feminist. In the memoir she writes, “I’m not a big fan of Women’s Liberation,” and, forty years later, she garnered headlines for her support of Donald Trump. Even so, she’s been calling out “that old double standard” her entire career. The songs that she’s written or chosen for herself have repeatedly blasted misogynistic attitudes that excuse or idealize male misbehavior. The most emblematic example of this became her first No. 1 hit, in 1966, the punchy-and-pissed “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).” In that song, she reads the morning-after riot act to a husband who’s returned home late, drunk again and “a-kissin’ on me.” She’s mad that he woke her up from a sound sleep, mad that he didn’t take her along with him in the first place, and maddest of all that he tried to force himself on her.

Lynn includes a new version of “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ ” on her new album, “Wouldn’t It Be Great,” the forty-first studio album of her career. The song sounds less punchy now but even more pissed. On the original recording, Lynn’s lecture comes off as righteous but also amusing, and, to gingerly use a somewhat condescending but common descriptor of her work, feisty. That less-threatening affect no doubt eased the way for such an angry song to become such a big hit. The new version is less sprightly—it feels weightier, more grounded. It’s as though Lynn, who is eighty-six, has swapped out her trademark spunk and sass for something wearier. Just how many times is she going to have to explain this?

Thanks to the memoir—and the film adaptation of it, starring Sissy Spacek, from 1980—Lynn’s story is well known. She grew up poor in Appalachian Kentucky to a coal-mining dad whom she adored. When she was fifteen, she married a boy from a nearby holler who had two nicknames: Doo (short for Doolittle) and Mooney (short for moonshine). Doo moved the couple to Washington State, where Lynn became a mother of four by the age that most girls are graduating from high school. Doo also bought her a guitar, and, when he thought she’d become good enough, began booking her at honky-tonks and encouraging her to write songs. Eventually, the pair made its way back east, to Nashville, where Lynn was befriended and mentored by Patsy Cline, who at the time was the most successful woman in country music, and also by the legendary Nashville Sound producer Owen Bradley, who, during the next two decades, became Lynn’s studio partner on more than fifty Top 10 country hits, about a dozen of which were duets with Conway Twitty.

This version of the Loretta Lynn story, which Lynn herself is largely responsible for, tends to present the singer as a woman in a man’s world, mostly guided by, and reacting to, the men around her. But it wasn’t just Cline: the key figures in Lynn’s early artistic development were just as often women as they were men. Lynn’s most important vocal inspiration was Kitty Wells, who, before Cline came along, was the only woman in country history to consistently score major solo hits. Wells topped the charts with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” in 1952. “Too many times married men think they’re still single,” Wells sang. “That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.” Lynn, who was twenty when the song was released, sang along at home and tried to sound like her idol. Eight years later, she had her own hit, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” which was among the first songs she ever wrote, and, perhaps, a “me, too” from one honky-tonk angel to another.

Lynn looked to other women for songwriting models, including Betty Sue Perry, who wrote four of Lynn’s first eight solo hits. (Perry, who died in 1974, is too little remembered now.) In the same way that Merle Haggard unlocked much of his own songwriting potential by recording the songs of Liz Anderson, Lynn seems, with the songs of Perry, to have first caught a glimpse of the character she was born to play. Some of Perry’s songs for Lynn, such as “Before I’m Over You” or “The Home You’re Tearing Down,” were in the Kitty Wells tradition: in them, Lynn plays the role of a woman scorned, clinging to lost love or raising the kids alone. But Perry’s “The Other Woman” lets Lynn empathize with the so-called homewrecker, a daring perspective for a female country singer at the time. And in “Wine, Women, and Song,” which was released in April, 1964, and became Lynn’s biggest hit to date, Lynn embodied, for the first time on record, the performer we best know today: a working-class woman who isn’t about to take your guff and will fight for what’s hers.

Lynn’s string of early-sixties hits, as well as contemporaneous chart runs from Skeeter Davis and from Cline, who died in a plane crash in 1963, launched a golden age for women on country radio—or what passed for one, after years when they barely registered. The arrival of other performers, such as Connie Smith and Dottie West, accompanied soon enough by the rise of the country superstars Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton, seemed, at the time, to represent a seismic shift toward gender parity. In the seventies, duets came to exemplify a country-music era focussed on the cultural conversation between women and men: there was Lynn singing with Twitty, Parton with Porter Wagoner, and Wynette with George Jones. A country-radio dialogue between men and women, meeting on equal terms and tackling the domestic issues that mattered to them most, seemed surely just around the corner. It hasn’t played out that way.

On “Wouldn’t It Be Great,” Lynn fits her sounds, and songs new and old, to this American century, but she’s still talking back to men and honoring other women. Except when she’s talking back to them, too, as on the uproarious “Ruby’s Stool,” in which she empties an ashtray into the beer can of the rival dancing with her husband. This is a longstanding mode for her, too: in two of Lynn’s best-loved songs, “Fist City” (“I’ll grab you by the hair of the head, and I’ll lift you off of the ground”) and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man),” she takes it to women whom her husband has been flirting with—or worse.

Another song on the new album, “Lulie Vars,” is about a young pregnant woman murdered by the man who doesn’t want to marry her; it’s a harrowing ballad that could be decades old or based on this morning’s news. There’s also a fine new version of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (though, frustratingly, it does not include the six additional verses that Lynn has said were cut from the original and has been teasing for decades). And it’s a nice touch that this album, like the two before it (“Full Circle” and “White Christmas Blue,” both from 2016), is co-produced, along with John Carter Cash, by Lynn’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell.

The album’s high point, though, is its title track. One way to hear “Wouldn’t It Be Great?” is as a nod to her fellow country divas, Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette. Lynn released the song as a single, in 1985, but she last cut it in 1993, on an album that the three women recorded together, called “Honky Tonk Angels.” But the presence here of that new version of “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” suggests that an even better way to hear “Wouldn’t It Be Great?” is as a kind of answer song to “Don’t Come Home.” “Wouldn’t it be fine,” Lynn begins, “if you could say you love me just one time with a sober mind?” The man she’s addressing has been brought low by alcoholism; Lynn has said that she sang it to her late husband, Doo, during his final days, in 1996. In this song, the man still comes home a-drinkin’, but lovin’s out of the question. “Love went to waste when my sexy lace couldn’t turn his face,” she sings. “The bottle took my place.”

For a time, it seemed as though “Wouldn’t It Be Great” wouldn’t be released. Lynn suffered a stroke in the spring of 2017, and she decided to hold the album’s release until she had recovered enough to promote it. A fractured hip extended the delay, and Lynn’s health remains a concern: she skipped an album-release event in Nashville, last month, because she was “feeling a bit under the weather.”

On October 17th, Lynn is scheduled to receive the Artist of a Lifetime award on CMT, during the cable network’s “Artists of the Year” telecast. This year’s edition of the program has been designed to spotlight women in country music. Carrie Underwood; Miranda Lambert; Maren Morris; and Karen Fairchild, of Little Big Town, are set to appear, among others. It’s a lineup that comes reasonably close to including just about every one of the few women who are played today on mainstream country radio. (The ratio of women to men on playlists has been reduced, as the radio consultant Keith Hill infamously said, in 2015, to roughly the equivalent of tomatoes to lettuce in a salad.) Fêting Lynn, the woman who did the most to break down doors for women in country, is a savvy gesture, but also a perfectly frustrating reminder that, more than half a century after her arrival on the charts, women are as locked out of the format as they have been in decades.

But they are not, thank goodness, locked out of the genre—and a good part of the thanks for that goes to Lynn. It’s probably impossible to fashion any gesture that could adequately acknowledge her legacy. But wouldn’t it be great if, as Lynn stood at the microphone accepting her award, the female musicians whom she’s inspired through the years gathered behind her? Current stars, like Underwood and Lambert, but also all the contemporary talents who should be in radio rotation but aren’t: Brandy Clark, Mickey Guyton, Lori McKenna, Ashley Monroe. And then, behind them, stars of a recent vintage—Shania Twain, Patty Loveless, and Lee Ann Womack, followed by Reba McEntire and K. T. Oslin and Barbara Mandrell and more. Picture, too, the women who were never going to get on the radio but are impossible to imagine without Lynn’s model: Iris Dement, say, and Lucinda Williams. This crowd of country women would stretch on and on, until, finally, we see Tammy and Dolly there, too. Picture all those women, standing behind Lynn, standing there because of her, singing and playing in her footsteps. Call them the Lynettes.