Up Front and Unadorned

For 56 YEARS, Loretta Lynn has rarely paused from recording and touring. A career path that long is bound to have its ups and downs. But the past decade or so has definitely seen a Loretta Lynn renaissance.

It started back in 2004 with the album Van Lear Rose, a collection steeped in the rootsy alt-rock aesthetic of Jack White, who produced, played guitar, and even sang a duet with Lynn. Next came the 2010 tribute album Coal Miner’s Daughter, on which White’s band, The White Stripes, was joined by artists ranging from Alan Jackson and Martina McBride to Nashville outsiders Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle to perform a sampling of Lynn’s greatest hits. This year has seen the debut of a PBS American Masters documentary about Lynn and another startlingly good new album, Full Circle.

Both the title and the choice of material on Full Circle sound for all the world like a lifetime victory lap for the 84-year-old singer-songwriter. Telling the story of her career, the collection starts with a re-recording of the first song she ever wrote (“Whispering Sea”) and ends with a Willie Nelson duet on “Lay Me Down,” a song that features the line, “I’ll be at peace when they lay me down.” In between, she revisits a couple more of her older songs, and, for the first time, records the kind of traditional old-time material she heard growing up in the east Kentucky mountain community of Butcher Holler.

When Loretta Lynn came to Nashville in 1960, she was without precedent—a female country singer who wrote her own songs. She didn’t follow the rules of the music business because she and her manager-husband didn’t know them. Instead, Lynn came to town as a do-it-yourself phenomenon, promoting her records out of the trunk of the family car.

And her greatest songs had little in common with the manufactured products of Music Row. Many of them were, instead, direct, brutally frank, and heartfelt personal statements about love, marriage, and family that made Lynn a proto-feminist icon. “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind),” and “Fist City” were chronicles of a stormy, decades-long marriage in which, by all accounts, including her own, Lynn gave as good as she got. Other songs, most notably “One’s On the Way” and “The Pill,” reflected an honest ambivalence about motherhood that was at the time especially disturbing to the male gatekeepers of popular culture.

That side of Lynn’s work is represented on Full Circle by a “Fist City” remake that, like the rest of the tracks, ditches both the countrypolitan sheen of some of her ’60s and ’70s records and the rough edges of Van Lear Rose for stripped-down arrangements heavy on the acoustic sounds. Her versions of traditional tunes “In the Pines,” “I Never Will Marry,” and “Black Jack David” are revelations that have been far too long in coming. And throughout the album Lynn’s octogenarian voice, placed up front and unadorned in the mix, is still miraculously strong and clear.

Despite Full Circle’s title and its narrative arc, it really isn’t the end of anything. Over the past several years, Lynn has been steadily recording in Johnny Cash’s old studio out from Nashville, produced by her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, and John Carter Cash, son of Johnny and June. She has 93 songs in the can that will be released in a series of albums over the next several years. It seems that Loretta Lynn’s last act of DIY defiance will be the defining of her own cultural legacy.