By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Loretta Lynn’s death had the usual effect on me. I went to the internet and looked up her songs. Technology did not disappoint; there were hundreds of performances to view.
I can only admit that I ended up mystified. Her songs went from the ordinary to the surreal; from the earnest sentimentality of Coal Miner’s Daughter to the casual brutality of Fist City, from the wry humor of The Pill to the Hopperesque sadness of Honkytonk Girl.
In my own professional terms, her music would belong in our lower level trial courts. She sang about drinking and fighting and cussing and sex. But the effect can be disconcerting. Fist City is little more than a threat to punch another woman’s lights out. But she sings it with a smile, all but smothered in chiffon. On the one hand, it reminds me of the sort of violence I last saw in elementary school, where little girls in dresses pulled each others’ hair. On the other hand it’s as purposefully ugly as gangster rap.
This sort of duality has a long history in the arts. One of my favorite writers is Henry Fielding, whose most famous work is Tom Jones, a rollicking novel about an orphan’s adventures in published in England in 1749. They made a popular movie out of it in the 1960’s with Albert Finney and Susannah York. Both movie and book are worth your time. But Fielding wrote another novel called Jonathan Wild, about the adventures of a criminal by that name. Compare it to another one of London’s most popular works in the 1700’s, The Beggar’s Opera, a play by John Gay about a criminal named MacHeath. That one got updated too. Bertoldt Brecht based his Threepenny Opera on it and Bobby Darin made a lot of money singing about Mack the Knife.
Londoners seemed to enjoy these irony-laden celebrations of their country’s lower classes, and given that those works were so fashionable in the 1700’s, it is easy to imagine Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson being in the loop. I can only hope and trust that our Supreme Court justices (who nowadays pretend that they can read the thoughts of our founding fathers) are familiar with all of these books and plays. But for some reason I don’t see Amy Coney Barrett snuggling up by the fireplace with a dog-eared copy of anything by Brecht.
Jonathan Wild is a less sophisticated work than Tom Jones, but as a criminal defense lawyer, I appreciate its verisimilitude. Fielding worked as a magistrate who oversaw the equivalent of a local trial court in London. He wrote about what he knew. His hero was a liar, a braggart, a rough and violent man with a giant streak of romance in his character. Loretta Lynn would have recognized him instantly. (Maybe Amy Barrett could at least read Treasure Island, whose Long John Silver owes a lot to MacHeath.)
We often make the mistake of being surprised by our forebears; by how much they liked to get drunk and fight, by how deeply they fell in love with each other, by how skeptical and distant they could be from their own follies, as if our species has somehow made gigantic advances in the handful of centuries that make up our recorded history. Loretta Lynn herself disappeared from public consciousness for a while until a rock musician named Jack White from the band the White Stripes made an album with her in 2004. Then the critics fell over themselves praising how authentic she was. Rock and rollers love talking down to Nashville but Nashville nearly always seems to get the last laugh.
One particular performance of hers really caught my eye. She was guest-starring on some country-western show and they had her sing Harper Valley PTA. That’s almost a novelty number, a humorous story set to music about a snooty small town getting its comeuppance from a sharp-eyed outsider. Loretta starts to sing and then gets lost. She fluffs a lyric or two and loses the rhythm. She starts laughing at herself, but gamely keeps going. By the end, her eyes are all merriment. And after she finishes, she calls out the show’s staff for not letting her sing what she wanted, and she brings out the guys who were holding the cue cards for her. Everyone is laughing. The clip ends with a giant cue card being held over her head and folding on top of her. She was regularly called a diva but that word fits nothing but her voice. She seems to have had genuine love for her co-workers, her audience, and ultimately her own work.
RIP, Loretta. You were a little bit scary, but you sure looked pretty on that stage.
He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and his most recent one, The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.