If you wanted to pick a single Loretta Lynn song to encapsulate the country star’s life, career, spirit and the particular way she wove all three together, the choice would not be easy. You might reach for Coal Miner’s Daughter, her signature track, which told of her upbringing in Butcher Hollow, a mining community in Appalachian Kentucky – its poverty, love, perseverance. This was, after all, the root of her storytelling, and that famed vibrato that long carried a backwoods flavour. Or you might lean toward her first No 1 hit, 1966’s Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind), that cemented some of the singer’s presiding themes – relationships, and how a woman might handle her wayward husband’s boozing.
But there would be strong argument to choose an outlier: the title track from her final album, last year’s Still Woman Enough. Accompanied by fellow country stars Reba McEntire and Carrie Underwood, Lynn sang of a long life of struggle, determination and triumph. “I know how to love, lose and survive,” the lyrics ran. “Ain’t much I ain’t seen and I ain’t tried.” The song made a companion piece to one of her most famous hits, You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man). Released in 1966, it was a response to a love rival, feather-spitting in its defiance: “Sometimes a man’s caught lookin’ at things he don’t need / He took a second look at you, but he’s in love with me.” Its sister song of 2021 had lost none of the original’s smarts.
