When I was in my teens, I had no use for country music.
I grew up in Ohio and Northern Virginia, and to me country music was slop jars, corncobs and hillbillies. It was completely rural and I was strictly suburban. As I grew up, I got to where I could enjoy so-called country rock, with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, but it was a Jack Nicholson movie in 1970 where it first got to me..
Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, who had grown up in a family of classical musicians only to reject them and go to work on an oil rig. His blue-collar lifestyle took him into beer bars where they played all kinds of music –country and western. The first song that really struck me was Tammy Wynette singing the classic “Stand By Your Man.”
When I heard “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” I was hooked. I actually added “Tammy Wynette’s Greatest Hits” to my burgeoning record collection. And when Johnny Cash dueted with Bob Dylan on “Girl From the North Country,” I was definitely taking notice.
Ironically, the one person I wasn’t noticing was Loretta Lynn.
I found out who she was and what she meant through Robert Altman’s brilliant film “Nashville,” a fictionalized 1975 version of the capital of country music. Karen Black was the Tammy Wynette character, while Ronee Blakely was the fragile Barbara Jean, the Loretta Lynn character.
But it was 1979, when Sissy Spacek played Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” that I really fell in love with her.
Actually, both of them. Loretta and Sissy.
I always enjoyed this one story about Spacek at the beginning of her own career. Before she decided to become an actress, her real dream was to be a country music star. She apparently was quite impressive in her audition, but was told there was one problem she. couldn’t overcome.
They told her she sounded wonderful, but they already had a Loretta Lynn.
Spacek had the last laugh, though. When she acted and sang as Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Lynn wasn’t even halfway through a great career in 1979, and she was still singing and recording into her eighties. When President Obama honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, he summed up her career perfectly.
Obama called her the “rule-breaking, record-setting queen of country music” who “gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about.”
She didn’t live quite as long as the other Queen who died recently, but she too will be remembered long past her passing.