{"id":1673268,"date":"2022-10-05T06:32:57","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T10:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1673268"},"modified":"2022-10-05T06:35:23","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T10:35:23","slug":"loretta-lynn-was-the-best-of-us-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/loretta-lynn-was-the-best-of-us-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Loretta Lynn Was The Best Of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Floretta-lynn-was-the-best-of-us-2%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1673268&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>Surely the cultural establishment from Nashville to New York will claim Loretta Lynn as something of a progressive in the wake of her passing. This is not a trivial parcel of land for them to plant their flag upon, but it\u2019s also not anyone\u2019s to take. Lynn, whose voice rivals George Jones and Hank Williams as the defining sound of country music, is just\u00a0as complicated as the world she leaves behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Lynn looked every bit like the southern matriarch she became after ascending to the heights of country music stardom in the late 1960s \u2014 more Scarlett O\u2019Hara than Shania Twain \u2014 but the stories she told had fewer frills. If Williams was the Hillbilly Shakespeare, Lynn was the Hillbilly Dickinson. Unlike Williams, of course, Lynn lived to the ripe old age of 90, having shown mastery at the craft of American songwriting on later records like \u201cVan Lear Rose\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2018\/10\/17\/the-power-of-loretta-lynns-new-album\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cWouldn\u2019t It Be Great.\u201d\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Listen to \u201cMiss Being Mrs.,\u201d a piercing lamentation on widowhood literally discovered by Jack White during a visit to Lynn\u2019s house in the early aughts. The barebones recording is American music at its finest, but the lyrics penned by Lynn herself are just as understated and just as deep.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Country went pop, but she didn\u2019t go with it. She kept her head down and did the tradition proud.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>After years of tumult, Lynn\u2019s marriage to her well-known companion \u201cDoolittle\u201d ended with his death in 1996. Their relationship provided Lynn with plenty of fodder as a singer-songwriter whose few qualms about bringing the country into her world allowed her to join the cultural fray with an authentic depiction of sex and womanhood in a changing world. She alone wrote hits like \u201cYou Ain\u2019t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),\u201d \u201cRated X\u201d and, of course, the career-defining \u201cCoal Miner\u2019s Daughter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Pill,\u201d made famous by Lynn in 1975, became one of country radio\u2019s legendary banned songs, although it ultimately became one of her most popular songs too. Therein lies the wonderful nuance of Loretta Lynn, and American women honest enough to grapple with the oddities of life in 20th-century America, where a coal miner\u2019s daughter went from rags to riches and from \u201cscrubbing clothes on a washboard every day\u201d to helming a multimillion-dollar musical empire.<\/p>\n<p>This duality is everywhere in Lynn\u2019s catalog. You can hear it in her music, in the sweet feminine voice talking tough to anyone in her way, in her comfort with womanhood and her comfort with changing it. Lynn loved Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. She wasn\u2019t \u201ca fan of Women\u2019s Liberation\u201d but did more to normalize birth control than much of the second wave.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Friend to Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette, born in 1932 and married in 1948, Lynn had her first baby at the age of 16 and died when the average maternal age in America was 30 and women are starting to wonder if things went a little too far.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Lynn sang Shel Silverstein\u2019s lyrics in \u201cOne\u2019s On The Way,\u201d released one year into the 1970s:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cThe girls in New York City, they all march for women\u2019s lib<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And Better Homes and Gardens shows the modern way to live<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And the pill may change the world tomorrow but meanwhile today<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin\u2019, the dog is a barkin\u2019, and the floor needs a scrubbin.\u2019<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is why the arbiters of American culture will struggle to capture her legacy. What the trained feminist eye might see as a tension is perfectly easy to reconcile. It\u2019s about class. Before <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2019\/02\/22\/plate-flipping-miranda-lambert-can-help-country-swerve-from-the-car-pool-lane\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">swerving into the carpool lane<\/a>, that\u2019s what country music did better than any other pillar of the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n<p>Within hours of her passing, The Washington Post\u2019s pop music critic absurdly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/music\/2022\/10\/04\/loretta-lynn-the-pill\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">wrote<\/a>, \u201c[I]f \u2018Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter\u2019 was Lynn\u2019s hallmark, \u2018The Pill\u2019 is her triumph, and its legacy in a post-Roe America has become more complicated than previously imaginable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He added, \u201cAnd here\u2019s something even messier: Lynn was an early and avid supporter of Donald Trump, the candidate-turned-president whose Supreme Court appointees, in their eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, would help strip away the very rights that her art ultimately fought for. How do we begin to understand that?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, Chris Richards, it\u2019s not that hard. \u201cI just think he\u2019s the only one who\u2019s going to turn this country around,\u201d she said of Trump in 2016, echoing millions of other Americans who somehow manage to love both the comforts of modernity and the former president. \u201cThe Pill\u201d is a fine song, but it\u2019s nowhere near the class-conscious rural anthem that is \u201cCoal Miner\u2019s Daughter\u201d unless you\u2019re wearing media blinders.<\/p>\n<p>Midcentury upward mobility made the American Dream real for a lot of people in Lynn\u2019s generation, and their successes came alongside major changes to everyday life. By the time Trump came around, he was tapping into something so much deeper than partisan politics, and those anxieties were primarily defined by class. <\/p>\n<p>People say country music is about telling stories. A lot of music is about telling stories. Country music at its best is about doing more with less, sonically, thematically, literally.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Loretta Lynn represented the best of country music and the best of the country itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America\u2019s Foundation. She\u2019s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d \u201cMedia Buzz,\u201d and \u201cThe McLaughlin Group.\u201d Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, host of The Hill\u2019s weekly show \u201cRising Fridays,\u201d and a visiting fellow at Independent Women&#8217;s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Surely the cultural establishment from Nashville to New York will claim Loretta Lynn as something of a progressive in the wake of her passing. This is not a trivial parcel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":554,"featured_media":1673272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1673268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1673268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1673272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1673268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1673268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1673268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}