Loretta Lynn
To make it in this business, you either have to be first, great or different, says living legend Loretta Lynn. And I was the first to ever go into Nashville, singin it like the women lived it. Loretta first arrived in Nashville 55 years ago, signing her first recording contract on February 1, 1960, and within a matter of weeks, she was at her first recording session. A self-taught guitarist and songwriter, Lynn became one of the most distinctive performers in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s, shaking things up by writing her own songs, many of which tackled boundary-pushing topics drawn from her own life experiences as a wife and mother. In addition to being first, she was also great and different. Loretta Lynns instantly recognizable delivery is one of the greatest voices in music history. As for different, no songwriter has a more distinctive body of work. In lyrics such as Dont Come Home A-Drinkin and Your Squaw Is on the War Path she refused to be any mans doormat. She challenged female rivals in You Aint Woman Enough and Fist City. She showed tremendous blue-collar pride in Coal Miners Daughter and Youre Lookin at Country. She is unafraid of controversy, whether the topic is sex (Wings Upon Your Horns), divorce (Rated X), alcohol (Wouldnt It Be Great) or war (Dear Uncle Sam). The Pill, her celebration of sexual liberation, was banned by many radio stations. Like the lady herself, Loretta Lynns songs shoot from the hip.As millions who read her 1976 autobiography or saw its Oscar winning 1980 film treatment are aware, Loretta is a Coal Miners Daughter who was raised in dire poverty in a remote Appalachian Kentucky hamlet. Living in a mountain cabin with seven brothers and sisters, she was surrounded by music as a child.I thought everybody sang, because everybody up there in Butcher Holler did, she recalls. Everybody in my family sang. So I really didnt understand until I left Butcher Holler that there were some people who couldnt. And it was kind of a shock.She famously married Oliver Doolittle Lynn when she was a barely schooled child of 13. Doo was a 21-year-old war veteran with a reputation as a hell raiser. When she was seven months pregnant with her first child, they moved far away from Appalachia to Custer, Washington. By age 18, she had four children (two more, twins, came along in 1964). Isolated from her native culture and burdened with domestic work, she turned to music for solace.Before I was singing, I cleaned house; I took in laundry; I picked berries. I worked seven days a week. I was a housewife and mother for 15 years before I was an entertainer. And it wasnt like being a housewife today. It was doing hand laundry on a board and cooking on an old coal stove. I grew a garden and canned what I grew. Thats whats real. I know how to survive.Doo heard her singing at her chores and declared that she sounded just as good as anyone he heard on the radio. He bought her a guitar and told her to learn how to play it and write songs with it. Loretta says her songs were so forthright because she didnt know any better.After he got me the guitar, I went out and bought a Country Song Roundup. I looked at the songs in there and thought, Well, this aint nothing. Anybody can do this. I just wrote about things that happened. I was writing about things that nobody talked about in public, and I didnt realize that they didnt. I was having babies and staying at home. I was writing about life. Thats why I had songs banned.Doo began pushing her to perform in area nightclubs. Executives from Zero Records heard her in a nightspot across the border in Vancouver, Canada. She soon recorded her debut single, Im a Honky Tonk Girl, for the little label. Loretta made herself a fringed cowgirl outfit, and she and Doo drove across the country in his old Mercury sedan promoting the single at station after station.Astonishingly, it worked. The disc hit the popularity charts in the summer of 1960 and brought the couple to Music City. She began singing regularly on the Grand Ole Opry after her debut on Oct. 15, 1960. The shows Wilburn Brothers took her under their wings. Teddy Wilburn helped to polish Lorettas startlingly original songwriting style. Brother Doyle Wilburn took a tape of her singing Fool #1 to producer Owen Bradley at Decca Records. Owen liked the song, but was already working with Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, Brenda Lee and Patsy Cline and said he didnt need another female singer. Teddy told him that he couldnt have the song if he didnt sign its singer. As a result, Brenda had a smash pop hit with Fool #1, and Loretta got a Decca Records contract. Like everyone else who encountered her, Owen Bradley was smitten with Lorettas innocence, individualism, infectious wit, independent spirit, humorous candor, refreshing frankness and immense talent. In fact, he came to regard her as the female Hank Williams.Lorettas Decca chart debut came with 1962s Success. It became the first of her 51 top-10 hits and led to an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry cast later that year. Her fellow Opry cast member Patsy Cline taught her how to dress, style her hair and wear make-up. The Wilburns began featuring her on their nationally syndicated TV series. She sang a series of sassy domestic ditties with her childhood hero, Ernest Tubb. As a solo, she hit her stride with Wine, Women and Song (1964) and Happy Birthday (1965), both of them feisty, dont-step-on-me numbers. Shes the spokesman for the ladies, observed the late Owen Bradley. Loretta had a lot of different ideas, and they were very fresh. Womens lib was also coming on at that time. You have to be in the right place at the right time. And I think Loretta was standing right there.Most of my songs were from the womens point of view, Loretta wrote in her best-selling autobiography. Thats who Im singing about and singing to during my shows. And the girls know it.Most of my fan club is women, which is how I want it.Among Lorettas finest moments on disc are such empowering female statements as You Wanna Give Me Lift (1970), I Wanna Be Free (1971), Weve Come a Long Way Baby (1978), Hey Loretta (1973), Love Is the Foundation (1973) and the hilarious Ones on the Way (1972). She memorably romanced and sassed Conway Twitty in a number of hugely popular duet performances in 1970-1982. In 1967, she began picking up various Female Vocalist of the Year trophies. She and Conway also won a long string of Duet of the Year awards beginning in 1971, The industry showered her with BMI songwriting honors, Gold Record plaques, a Grammy Award and other accolades. In 1972, she became the first woman in history to win the Country Music Associations Entertainer of the Year trophy. By the mid-1970s, Loretta Lynn was an undeniable superstar. She was featured on the covers of Newsweek (1973), Redbook (1974) and many other mainstream national publications. With her kookie humor, scrambled grammar and unpretentious manner, she became a TV talk-show favorite.Loretta continued to dominate the charts as the 70s drew to a close, scoring major hits with 1976s Somebody Somewhere, 1977s Out of My Head and Back in My Bed and 1979s Ive Got a Picture of Us on My Mind. Her 1982 smash hits I Lie and Making Love From Memory carried her into the new decade.One of the most remarkable things about Loretta Lynn is how she renews her creativity time and again. Two years after she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983, she was back on the charts with the hit, Heart Dont Do This to Me. In 1988, the year she entered the Country Music Hall of Fame, Loretta recorded with k.d. lang. She earned a Gold Record in 1994 with Honky Tonk Angels, a trio CD with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette. Doo died in 1996. Numb with grief, Loretta admits that she was lost in a fog for more than a year. But she came back again with a 2000 CD titled Still Country. She also returned to the concert trail.Its a good thing, too, she says. Because if I hadnt, I would have been nuts by now. I would have been completely nuts.Loretta published a second memoir, Still Woman Enough, in 2002. She was honored at The Kennedy Center in 2003, yet pushed forward again the following year by winning two Grammy Awards for Van Leer Rose, a collaboration with rocker Jack White. Also in 2004, she published a book of recipes and anecdotes titled Youre Cookin It Country.Lynn is also one of the most awarded musicians of all time. She has been inducted into more music Halls of Fame than any female recording artist, including The Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and was the first woman to be named the Country Music Associations Entertainer of the Year in 1972. Lynn received Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She has won four Grammy Awards (including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010) and sold more than 45 million records worldwide.In March 2016, Legacy Recordings will release FULL CIRCLE, Lorettas first new studio album in over ten years. Produced by Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash, and recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, FULL CIRCLE will take listeners on a journey through Loretta's musical story, from the Appalachian folk songs and gospel music she learned as a child, to new interpretations of her classic hits and country standards, to songs newly-written for the project. That same month, PBS will also broadcast the the nationwide premiere of a new documentary about Lorettas remarkable life and career called American Masters Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl. The film will explore the country legends hard-fought road to stardom. From her Appalachian roots to the Oscar-winning biopic of her life, "Coal Miners Daughter," Lynn struggled to balance family and her music career and is still going strong over 50 years later. Loretta Lynns life is still a work in progress. Shes still out there on the road, still writing songs and still recording them as only she can. I aint a star a star is something up in the night sky, says Loretta Lynn. People say to me, Youre a legend. Im not a legend. Im just a woman.
at Lincoln Theatre
1215 U Street NW
Washington, United States
Orignal From: Loretta Lynn
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