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Country icon Loretta Lynn proves that she’s ‘still woman enough’

By Paul Collins - For The Telegraph | Mar 27, 2021

In this March 17, 2016 file photo, Loretta Lynn performs at the BBC Music Showcase at Stubb's during South By Southwest in Austin, Texas. (AP photo)

On the cusp of turning 89 years old, country icon Loretta Lynn has just released her 50th solo studio album, “Still Woman Enough.” The album stands as a tangible proof point that underscores the fact that, in the minds of many, she still reigns as the Queen of country music. The album was produced by her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash, the son of country legend Johnny Cash.

From start to finish, she sings in an astonishingly robust voice that projects a tonal quality decades younger than her chronological years. So much so that she actually sounds the same as she did back in 1971 when she released her famous signature song “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

In that timeless and gritty autobiographical offering she chronicled her difficult childhood growing up in grinding rural poverty. What sustained her through the dark days of that childhood was her undying dream of one day making it to the top of the country music charts. Accompanying herself on a beat up guitar purchased in a pawn shop that surely had to have been a very distant dream for a young girl growing up in the hills of Kentucky.

Fifty years later, the way in which she captured the essence, and the feel of coal dust in the air and of a faded regional industry that was once the life’s blood of Kentucky and West Virginia, is still palpable. That song solidified her standing as a country music treasure.

Across 13 different song tracks on “Still Woman Enough,” we see this evergreen artist, with a career that stretches out across 60 years, looking over her shoulder as she dips down into the deep pool of some of her biggest hits.

She pays tribute to country music’s female legends of days gone by with songs that trace the roots of the country genre. Within the albums’ tracks she highlights some popular songs from the Carter family that sit alongside of updated versions of some of her own hits.

It’s worth pointing out that Lynn is definitely not mired down in the past, as she gets a lot of help on this album from some of today’s most popular female stars. Reba McEntire and Carrie Underwood are featured on the album’s title track backing up Loretta as she champions the strength and resilience of women handling adversity. In the album’s title track she shouts out, “I wasn’t raised to give up.” Think about that, a women who is standing on the threshold of celebrating her 89th birthday, and still displaying the same grit and determination that she did over a half century ago. She’s seems to still have the heart of a lion.

Margo Price joins her on “One’s on the Way,” a 1971 tongue-in-cheek classic penned by the stellar songwriter Shel Silverstein who wrote the Johnny Cash hit, “A Boy Named Sue.” Lynn and Price are teamed together singing of a housebound housewife who is barefoot and pregnant, but who is managing to soldier through it all.

With the energy and vocal timber of a teenager Lynn rips into a high-spirited version of the old hillbilly anthem “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

Speaking of women who project a sense of gritty independence, over the years, the irrepressible Tanya Tucker has become country music’s poster child for them. She joins in on the album’s closer, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To take my man).” This one has Loretta belting out the taunting lyrics. “For you to get to him, I’ll have to move over, and I’m gonna stand right here – It’ll be over my dead body.”

Speaking over a softly picked banjo, Lynn offers-up a touching and poignant spoken word recitation of her signature song. “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” “I’m a Honky-Tonk Girl,” her debut single that was originally released in 1960, is another one that has her singing in a feisty down-home voice that defies her years. Employing a light and breezy tone she dives into the deep end of country music history to resurrect the ghost of Hank Williams with her spry cover of his timeless “I Saw the Light.”

Eons ago Loretta Lynn set the standard for a poignant and thought-provoking brand of song stylings that painted vivid pictures of rural malaise, family heartbreak, and the bleak drudgery and back-breaking toil of men mining coal from deep within the bowels of the earth as a means to feed their families.

Her songs painted a vivid face on the hardships of life in rural America. Today, the world is a far different place than it was when the Queen of Country Music released her first song. And yet, the more thing change, the more they stay the same. On her 50th studio album, across all 13 tracks her performance is intimate, sassy and fun. On some cuts you can almost hear a girlish laughter in her voice as she recreates some of the songs that showcase her vast musical repertoire.

Across more than a half century, Loretta Lynn’s song catalogue has been a source of inspiration for the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert, Faith Hill and many other female country stars of today. In the long-ago and far away days of a now half-forgotten time, Lynn had the boldness and talent to shatter the glass ceiling. She broke new ground by bringing a woman’s perspective to what was then a country music industry that was almost exclusively male-dominated. She has traveled down a long road, and today, in the 21st century, Loretta Lynn is still a force to be reckoned with.

Paul Collins is a freelance writer from Southborough, Massachusetts.

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