The Daily Times

The joke is my wife is a little bit country and I’m a little bit rock ‘n’ roll.

I’m just not a huge country music fan. But I try to appreciate music broadly, in spite of my personal preferences. So it’s in that spirit that I accompanied my wife to see Loretta Lynn in concert this past Friday night at the Tennessee Theater.

Boy, I’m glad I did.

Leaving aside Ms. Lynn’s (and, yes, I think using the honorific is the only proper way to refer to this lady) status as a country music legend, the woman is just spunky as all get out. At 78 years old, the country songstress is every bit as feisty and fiery as her expansive discography paints her.

After singing a few tunes on Friday night, Ms. Lynn addressed the audience. “This is a pretty good show,” she said. “You all paid your way in here and I snuck in the back.”

She invited the audience to shout out requests. “And if I don’t know it, you can stand up and sing it yourself,” she said.

I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a performer as patently authentic as Loretta Lynn. Her vocal style and lyrics have are unique to her and her experiences. Everything about her performance is heartfelt and personal. (In “The Pill,” she’s singing about birth control for goodness sake!) There isn’t a hint of artifice to anything about her writing.

In many ways, Ms. Lynn’s work is the epitome of personal artistic expression. She distills her personal heartache into music that is intensely personal, but maintains thematic connections that are universally appealing.

A song like “Fist City” may not absolutely mesh with our own experiences, but we can all relate to the feeling. Who hasn’t wanted to give someone a one-way ticket to Fist City at some point? We can’t all be coal miners’ daughters, but we connect with the sentiment of Ms. Lynn’s signature song because we understand what it means to love and be loved, to be part of a family.

Loretta Lynn’s music is her attempt to the tell the truth as she sees it. And we have a word for that: Art.

Timothy Hankins is a writer, musician, critic and regular contributor to Weekend. Contact him at (weekendcolumn@hnkns.com)

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