This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/loretta-lynn-dead-remembrance.html
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 1 | Version 2 |
|---|---|
| The Singer I Loved Knew the Truth About No-Good Men and the No-Good World | |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| If I wanted to interview Loretta Lynn, I was going to have to write her a letter. This is what I was told a few years ago by someone with inside knowledge. She mostly wants to be left alone since the stroke, I was told. But she’ll read a letter if it makes it to her. Maybe drop it by the post office in Hurricane Mills, Tenn., where she’s owned a ranch since the 1960s. I was used to this practice by this point, writing letters to musicians I’d admired, sometimes not desiring anything at all other than a way to express gratitude. | If I wanted to interview Loretta Lynn, I was going to have to write her a letter. This is what I was told a few years ago by someone with inside knowledge. She mostly wants to be left alone since the stroke, I was told. But she’ll read a letter if it makes it to her. Maybe drop it by the post office in Hurricane Mills, Tenn., where she’s owned a ranch since the 1960s. I was used to this practice by this point, writing letters to musicians I’d admired, sometimes not desiring anything at all other than a way to express gratitude. |
| I knew that I wanted to talk to Loretta Lynn, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to talk to Loretta Lynn about. | I knew that I wanted to talk to Loretta Lynn, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to talk to Loretta Lynn about. |
| There’s a photo of Loretta Lynn that hangs in my home. It’s a photo Al Satterwhite took in 1973, when he went to Hurricane Mills, a town that would come to fully revolve around Ms. Lynn’s presence. In ’73, though, there were only a few houses in town, and Mr. Satterwhite knocked on a couple of doors before Loretta Lynn answered. She walked him around town, and he captured a photo of her standing with her hands clasped together in front of the modest post office, which at that time was just a small shack. | There’s a photo of Loretta Lynn that hangs in my home. It’s a photo Al Satterwhite took in 1973, when he went to Hurricane Mills, a town that would come to fully revolve around Ms. Lynn’s presence. In ’73, though, there were only a few houses in town, and Mr. Satterwhite knocked on a couple of doors before Loretta Lynn answered. She walked him around town, and he captured a photo of her standing with her hands clasped together in front of the modest post office, which at that time was just a small shack. |
| I cherished the photo for its many simplicities: Loretta in a monochromatic jacket with rolled-up sleeves and a button-up shirt, the smile on her face small, but it never took much temptation for her cheekbones to pronounce a joy beyond whatever the mouth itself showed. I loved Loretta Lynn because I grew up listening to women who sang songs about no-good men, or the no-good world, but were never at the mercy of anyone or anything. | I cherished the photo for its many simplicities: Loretta in a monochromatic jacket with rolled-up sleeves and a button-up shirt, the smile on her face small, but it never took much temptation for her cheekbones to pronounce a joy beyond whatever the mouth itself showed. I loved Loretta Lynn because I grew up listening to women who sang songs about no-good men, or the no-good world, but were never at the mercy of anyone or anything. |
| I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick to tell you what you weren’t gonna do on her watch. She slid seamlessly into the canon of women I listened to growing up, women whom I could easily map onto the women I loved and held close. | I found her to be one of the great romanticists because she was so committed to the rigors of loving herself that she suffered no one. She’d be quick to tell you what you weren’t gonna do on her watch. She slid seamlessly into the canon of women I listened to growing up, women whom I could easily map onto the women I loved and held close. |
| Loretta Lynn also understood work, but she did not bow to it, or praise it in the name of capital. It was what it was. When she was still touring, aggressively, and got asked about how she maintained the stamina to do it at her age, she’d shrug and say: “I work. I get on my bus and I ride my bus to the next date. And then I get back on the bus after the show and ride to the next date. Simple as that.” | Loretta Lynn also understood work, but she did not bow to it, or praise it in the name of capital. It was what it was. When she was still touring, aggressively, and got asked about how she maintained the stamina to do it at her age, she’d shrug and say: “I work. I get on my bus and I ride my bus to the next date. And then I get back on the bus after the show and ride to the next date. Simple as that.” |
| She knew of work that was worse, or that took a toll in worse ways. Three years after she was born, nine men were killed in a coal mine explosion in Van Lear, Ky., the community where Ms. Lynn’s family lived, and the town where her father worked, mining for years. He succumbed to black lung disease in 1959, a few years after moving his family away from the mines of Van Lear. | She knew of work that was worse, or that took a toll in worse ways. Three years after she was born, nine men were killed in a coal mine explosion in Van Lear, Ky., the community where Ms. Lynn’s family lived, and the town where her father worked, mining for years. He succumbed to black lung disease in 1959, a few years after moving his family away from the mines of Van Lear. |
| It could always be worse than the monotony of going from town to town, pushing through a revolving door of adoration. If you have seen people work themselves to death in a place where it seems like there is nothing else to do but work yourself to death, it’s easy to find a matter-of-fact simplicity in surviving less brutally than the loved ones you’ve buried. | It could always be worse than the monotony of going from town to town, pushing through a revolving door of adoration. If you have seen people work themselves to death in a place where it seems like there is nothing else to do but work yourself to death, it’s easy to find a matter-of-fact simplicity in surviving less brutally than the loved ones you’ve buried. |
| “Work” is maybe putting too neat of a bow onto what I actually mean, when considering the vast terrain covered in Loretta Lynn’s songwriting. I mean that a life is something you earn, and there is no failure in how you earn the life you have, because it is yours. And there is no failure in what you choose to leave behind, because what you choose to leave behind won’t serve you and so it must be forgotten. You can earn the ability to love, and so you can earn the broken heart. You can earn your loneliness and you can love it, too, because the men are still no-good and they ain’t getting any better. You can earn your longing, and you can earn a heart that wants to surrender, again, to a world that handles it without generosity. You can earn your drinks at a bar where people know to leave you be. A whole town that goes quiet at night. A moon that lights a pathway just for you and no one else. | “Work” is maybe putting too neat of a bow onto what I actually mean, when considering the vast terrain covered in Loretta Lynn’s songwriting. I mean that a life is something you earn, and there is no failure in how you earn the life you have, because it is yours. And there is no failure in what you choose to leave behind, because what you choose to leave behind won’t serve you and so it must be forgotten. You can earn the ability to love, and so you can earn the broken heart. You can earn your loneliness and you can love it, too, because the men are still no-good and they ain’t getting any better. You can earn your longing, and you can earn a heart that wants to surrender, again, to a world that handles it without generosity. You can earn your drinks at a bar where people know to leave you be. A whole town that goes quiet at night. A moon that lights a pathway just for you and no one else. |
| It was all there in the songs of Loretta Lynn. Songs about what women not just desired, but needed, to survive. Songs about never wanting to love again pressed up against songs about falling in love. She sung the lonely songs better the older she got, which some people might consider sad but I consider necessary. Enough decades of life suggests that one might begin to take an inventory of her aches and regrets, the absences that have been planted through the years and have grown only wider as the clock winds down. | It was all there in the songs of Loretta Lynn. Songs about what women not just desired, but needed, to survive. Songs about never wanting to love again pressed up against songs about falling in love. She sung the lonely songs better the older she got, which some people might consider sad but I consider necessary. Enough decades of life suggests that one might begin to take an inventory of her aches and regrets, the absences that have been planted through the years and have grown only wider as the clock winds down. |
| “I’m Dying for Someone to Live For” from the 2018 album “Wouldn’t It Be Great” is Ms. Lynn at her most heartbreaking but also her most surgically brilliant, as a writer of rich, transportive quality. The listener is there, present with her, overlooking an empty landscape, taking inventory of all of its sounds and movements and weighing the burdens of our own hearts against whatever small mercy from the natural world arrives in an attempt to keep us company. The weeping willow, the tide, gently pulling the hair of the shoreline. | “I’m Dying for Someone to Live For” from the 2018 album “Wouldn’t It Be Great” is Ms. Lynn at her most heartbreaking but also her most surgically brilliant, as a writer of rich, transportive quality. The listener is there, present with her, overlooking an empty landscape, taking inventory of all of its sounds and movements and weighing the burdens of our own hearts against whatever small mercy from the natural world arrives in an attempt to keep us company. The weeping willow, the tide, gently pulling the hair of the shoreline. |
| “There’s a whippoorwill out on a limb / I know I’m more lonesome than him,” so the song goes. And I believe it. The best Loretta Lynn songs could convince me of anything. I could be in love and briefly believe myself lonely. I could be lonely, and, for a moment, I’d believe I’d never be alone again. | “There’s a whippoorwill out on a limb / I know I’m more lonesome than him,” so the song goes. And I believe it. The best Loretta Lynn songs could convince me of anything. I could be in love and briefly believe myself lonely. I could be lonely, and, for a moment, I’d believe I’d never be alone again. |
| I’ve given up on the myth that anyone will live forever, at least on this side of living, the one we all know is promised for at least a little while. And so I have already mourned the world that wouldn’t hold Loretta Lynn. I have mourned it for years, knowing what I know of time. | I’ve given up on the myth that anyone will live forever, at least on this side of living, the one we all know is promised for at least a little while. And so I have already mourned the world that wouldn’t hold Loretta Lynn. I have mourned it for years, knowing what I know of time. |
| I know that Loretta Lynn got the letter I dropped off, and I was told she read it. I never wanted anything in return. Halfway through writing it, I’d abandoned the interview ask. Instead, I wrote to her about birds — how I loved writing about birds, and how she seemed to love writing about birds. I sent her a poem of mine, about an albatross. I told her I’d adored the imagery of birds that appeared in her songs for decades, the way she used the bird as a type of portal. Snowbirds and whippoorwills and bluebirds, like the bluebird in the song “I Wanna Be Free” from her 1971 album of the same name. The bluebird, in that song, singing to her, outside her window, beckoning her to fly away with it. Her baby had left her and everything was dying, but there was this bird, telling her it knew the way to freedom. | I know that Loretta Lynn got the letter I dropped off, and I was told she read it. I never wanted anything in return. Halfway through writing it, I’d abandoned the interview ask. Instead, I wrote to her about birds — how I loved writing about birds, and how she seemed to love writing about birds. I sent her a poem of mine, about an albatross. I told her I’d adored the imagery of birds that appeared in her songs for decades, the way she used the bird as a type of portal. Snowbirds and whippoorwills and bluebirds, like the bluebird in the song “I Wanna Be Free” from her 1971 album of the same name. The bluebird, in that song, singing to her, outside her window, beckoning her to fly away with it. Her baby had left her and everything was dying, but there was this bird, telling her it knew the way to freedom. |
| She rerecorded a version of “I Wanna Be Free” for her final living album, 2021’s “Still Woman Enough.” Her voice was more strained, more uneven. But still, she hit a ramp of vocal excitement in the moment where the song greets the bird and the moment directly after, where she sings, “well you know I think I’m a gonna live / gotta lotta love left in my heart to give.” | She rerecorded a version of “I Wanna Be Free” for her final living album, 2021’s “Still Woman Enough.” Her voice was more strained, more uneven. But still, she hit a ramp of vocal excitement in the moment where the song greets the bird and the moment directly after, where she sings, “well you know I think I’m a gonna live / gotta lotta love left in my heart to give.” |
| And she does, and she will. Elsewhere, beyond here. Loretta, I miss you already. Loretta, I will think of you whenever my eye catches a feather, pulled from the sky, blown off the edge of some bird’s lonely wing. | And she does, and she will. Elsewhere, beyond here. Loretta, I miss you already. Loretta, I will think of you whenever my eye catches a feather, pulled from the sky, blown off the edge of some bird’s lonely wing. |
| Hanif Abdurraqib, a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine, is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.” | Hanif Abdurraqib, a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine, is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.” |
| The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. | The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. |
| Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. | Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. |