WHEN performing in concert during her late career renaissance, Loretta Lynn would wear a bejewelled floor-length ballgown with – she claimed – bare feet concealed beneath. It’s difficult to imagine a more potent metaphor for an artist who was larger than life yet rooted in the Kentucky coal country where she was born and raised. Starry yet earthy, imperious yet plain-speaking, Lynn was one of the towering voices of American country music, and perhaps its most authentic. “If you’re looking at me”, she sang in one of her signature songs, “You’re looking at country”.
“She was such a trailblazer,” Lucinda Williams tells Uncut. “In terms of the way she wrote, particularly the way she wrote about women, they were incredibly forward-thinking songs for that time. She had an impact and influence on me as much as any of the female rock artists did. Yes, she was Nashville country and all that, but it wasn’t [just about] the style of her music. It was her attitude. She was a punk! I’ve always said Hank Williams was as punk as any punk artist. He had that punk attitude. Loretta Lynn was the same. She did what she wanted to do. She was independent. She was rebellious. What’s more punk than that? What’s rock’n’roll if not that? I loved everything about her.”
When news of Lynn’s death, at 90, broke on October 4, her collaborator and friend Jack White wrote: “Loretta used to say to make it in the business, you had to either be great, different, or first, and she thought that she was just different and that’s how she made it. But I think she was all three of those things and there’s plenty of evidence to back that up, too. I said years ago that I thought she was the
