Loretta Lynn, symbol of "rural resilience," dies at 90

That's part of the headline for her New York Times obituary yesterday, "Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90."  She was, of course, famously, a coal miner's daughter.  Here's an excerpt from the obituary with a focus on rurality: 

Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).

She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.

* * *

In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.

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Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”

Not to suggest that women everywhere could "do what they wanted," but this line reminds me of my own work on patriarchy in rural contexts, where I argued that it is a more intense phenomenon, aided and abetted by rural spatiality.  

Postscript:  Here's a commentary from The Conversation on Loretta Lynn as a "spokeswoman for white rural, working-class women."  Here's an excerpt:  

She aimed for her music to articulate the fears, dreams and anger of women living in a patriarchal society. It railed against those who idealized women’s domestic roles and demonized outspoken feminists.

‘There’s gonna be some changes’

Specifically, for a generation of predominantly white women in the 1960s and 1970s who did not identify as urban or college-educated feminists, Lynn’s music offered candid conversations about their private lives as wives and mothers.

As Lynn stated in her autobiography, her audience recognized her as a “mother and a wife and a daughter, who had feelings just like other women.”

She did this through clever and witty songwriting and lyrical techniques that combined the vernacular of her audience with her resonant voice.

* * * 

With her assertive and resonant voice, Lynn, in her 1966 track “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” warns men not to expect women to be waiting at home, sexually available for them after they’d spent the night drinking:

Well, you thought I’d be waitin’ up when you came home last night

You’d been out with all the boys and you ended up half tight

Liquor and love, they just don’t mix

Leave that bottle or me behind

And don’t come home a drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind

* * *

A lasting legacy

Fully aware that her personalized accounts became political messages for her fan base of women, Lynn co-wrote and recorded “The Pill” in 1975. It was a rare foray into the topic of women’s reproductive rights for country music. In typical fashion, though, Lynn approached the issue from the perspective of a rural working-class woman.