Loretta Lynn had a voice made for telling the truth.
High and flinty, with a bone-deep coal-country drawl that refused to fade even as she ascended to a queenly position in the Nashville star system, her singing sliced through polished arrangements like a sharpened blade. It could embody both the pain of betrayal and the thirst for revenge; it carried a longing for the comforts of home at the same time that it imagined ways to improve on the old days. And though she easily navigated tricky melodies — spare a thought for the countless karaoke DJs who’ve endured the mistreatment of “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” — her delivery was always straightforward: Here’s what happened, and don’t blame me if you can’t handle it. If Lynn, who died Tuesday at age 90, ever learned to soft-pedal an emotion, she never revealed it onstage or in the studio.
Indeed, honesty — about love, about motherhood, about the nature of women’s lives in an era of shifting mores — was perhaps the defining quality of Lynn’s half-century-long career as a country singer and songwriter eager to illuminate experiences too often hidden from view.
She pushed back against a husband’s territorialism in “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” a No. 1 hit — her first of 16 — in 1967. She described the sexual freedom afforded by widely available birth control in “The Pill” and, not coincidentally, the stigma faced by divorced women in the mid-’70s in “Rated X.” Her signature song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” rendered her rural upbringing in starkly unembarrassed language — then led to a bestselling memoir and a Hollywood film adaptation starring Sissy Spacek in the Oscar-winning title role.
The forthrightness of Lynn’s music turned a tale of would-be subjugation — married at 15, a mother by 16, ritually cheated on by the spouse who also acted as her manager — into one of female empowerment. Today we’d say she was taking control of her narrative, radically reframing its pressures and indignities to center her lived experience instead of those of the men around her.