If you know Nashville, then you probably know that there is nothing new about major country music stars also being Christian believers. In fact, it’s probably worthy of a headline or two if and when superstars send signals that they’re NOT at home in the Bible Belt.
That being said, I am still amazed when journalists produce stories about country artists and edit out the details in their lives and music that point toward faith. It happens all the time.
I’m not just talking about musicians putting a gospel song or two in their set lists when touring, as a kind of music-history exercise. I’m talking about reporters missing revelations in autobiographies, social-media statements to fans or mini-sermons on stage. I’m talking about passing up chances to talk with pastors who have known performers for years.
This brings me to the death of honky-tonk angel herself, Loretta Lynn — the matriarch for a generation or more of female artists in guitar town. As you would expect, the obits following her death stressed — with good cause, let me stress — her daring hit songs about blue-collar American life, with strong doses of reality about hard times, troubled homes, cracked marriages and lots of other sobering subjects.
Which is why, to cut to the chase, it’s even more important that this legend turned to Christian faith as an adult, in the midst of all that gritty stuff. Hold that thought. Here is a chunk of the Associated Press report that will appear in most American newspapers:
The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.
Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” …
Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.
“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.
All true. Lynn never hid her struggles and it was clear that her songs hit home for many women whose lives were not the stuff of the ordinary products in mainstream entertainment (or the content of sermons in many church pulpits).
For more commentary along those lines, here is a key section of the totally faith-free (#WaitForIt) obituary at The Nashville Tennessean:
In the early 1970s, Lynn wrote and recorded songs that weighed in on women’s roles in a changing America. “Rated ‘X’” bemoaned treatment of divorced women as damaged goods, while “The Pill” celebrated birth control as a sexual and social equalizer. These were modern, countrified folk songs, with Lynn serving as the housewife’s Woody Guthrie.
While she eschewed any connection with the women’s liberation movement of Gloria Steinem, Lynn’s songs insisted on something resembling fair play between the sexes. Her messages reached a segment of the female population that found little sense in marches and bra burnings and the like.
Again, all true. That’s crucial material in any tribute to this fierce female artist.
