Get Back Home, Loretta

There are at least half a dozen sequined gowns stuffed into the small closet on Loretta Lynn's big purple tour bus. "I like this one a whole lot," she says, running her hand down the shiny satin skirt of a beaded yellow number. The singer's gearing up for a tour to promote her new album, "Van Lear Rose." She reaches in to find another favorite, but accidentally pulls out a worn pink chenille robe instead. "Here she is, folks," she says, waving her hand over the tattered material. "The fabulous Loretta Lynn!"

Lynn may be a country-music legend and an American icon, but she's still the scabby-kneed Appalachian girl who married at 14, played one of her first gigs on the lawn of a sanitarium and had six kids before scoring her first top 10 hit. The 5-foot-2 Grand Ole Opry star sang songs for overworked housewives, such as "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" and "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," and by 1971 became a household name with "Coal Miner's Daughter," a ballad about her poor but happy childhood. By the 1980s, she had written 27 No. 1 hits. But Nashville was going pop, and Lynn became a symbol of country music's past: revered but not relevant. Now, thanks to an odd pairing with a garage rocker from Detroit, Lynn is hot again. Guitarist Jack White of White Stripes produced "Van Lear Rose" and recorded the songs as they did in the old days--in one or two takes. The result is spontaneous, raw and Lynn's most compelling work in years: sentimental one minute, knock-your-teeth-out tough the next.

The extremes on her album mirror the tumult of her marriage to Oliver Lynn (a.k.a. Doolittle, or Doo) almost 60 years ago. Fed up with his drinking and bullying early on, Lynn says, she decked him one night. Though their relationship was mercurial, he was the one who pushed the shy Loretta to stardom. "Doo came in from work and I was singing the babies to sleep," recalls Lynn, who just turned 70. "He thought I was a better singer than anyone out there on the radio. He said we should go out and try it for a few years--give it enough time to make some money and to buy a house, then I could quit. Two years later, we didn't have enough money to buy a hamburger."

The singer now owns her own restaurant on the Loretta Lynn Ranch, an hour outside Nashville, where fans can camp in their RVs, visit the Coal Miner's Daughter Museum and see a replica of the Kentucky cabin where she grew up. In her home, Lynn proudly displays her doll collection and pictures of her family, from her 29 grandkids to her own parents. Even though "Mama and Daddy" died several decades ago, they're very much alive in these parts.

"Van Lear Rose" was named after her mother: Van Lear was the local coal mine where Daddy worked, and Mama, the rose. Lynn sings about them and her rural roots on the upbeat fiddle number "High on a Mountain Top"--where "the rest of the world is like an itty-bitty spot." White's triumph here as a producer is getting Lynn to free-associate about her childhood while the tape is running. He also adds sublime steel-pedal guitar behind her, and the effect is haunting. "It was the easiest album I ever cut," says Lynn. "There's one song that has us laughing and I says, 'Come on, Jack, let's get the heck outta here.' He kept that on the record. It's like being in the front room, singing. It's countrier than anything I've ever cut."

Lynn's husband died of diabetes complications in 1996. "After he died," she says, "I only went out of the house once in an entire year, and it was to go shopping with my granddaughter. I bought a full-length mink coat. Now, where am I gonna wear that in Nashville?" Lynn looks down and brushes some invisible crumbs off her lap. "Maybe it'll get cold enough here one day." Until then, the tattered pink robe will do just fine.

© 2004