Nashville • I didn’t learn to love Loretta Lynn the way most children who grew up in Alabama in the 1960s and ‘70s did. My parents never listened to Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on Saturday nights. They’d courted to big band music in their youth, so they kept the radio tuned to the oldies station.
It’s not like I didn’t know who Loretta Lynn was. I’d heard her songs on other people’s radios all my life but paid them no mind.
Then I went off to faraway Philadelphia for graduate school and started tuning the radio in my apartment to the country station, just to hear the sound of my own people. My roommate would walk in, hear country music and ask, “Why are you punishing me?” I wasn’t punishing her. I was falling in love. Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Rosanne Cash, The Judds — they all made me feel as if home wasn’t really a thousand miles away.
That’s how I learned to love Loretta Lynn. But the way I learned to understand and respect her was the way I learn most things: by reading a book. I first read Ms. Lynn’s memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” at very nearly the same time I was learning to sing along with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the most famous of her many hit songs.
The South, the home I had stomped away from after college, convinced I could never spend my life in such a closed-minded place, was the same home I returned to, my tail between my legs, only four months after moving to Philadelphia.
Homesickness is what brought me back, but a growing understanding of the South and its true complexity is what has kept me here. And if there’s anybody who embodies that complexity more richly than Loretta Lynn does, I don’t know who it might be.
This mountain girl who had married as a teenager, a girl who had, by her own estimate, the equivalent of a fourth-grade education, who grew up so far from the rest of the developed world that she was 12 before she ever rode in an automobile — that isolated little girl grew up to be a legend.
She used her influence to change the music industry. Warned that country fans would never accept her again if she hugged the Black artist Charley Pride onstage at an awards ceremony, she hugged him anyway, and kissed him, too. Warned that certain subjects were too risky for country radio, she wrote songs like “The Pill” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” singing about what it was really like to be a working-class woman. “She broke down a lot of barriers for people that came after her,” the rocker Jack White said last week.
Her best-selling 1976 memoir — and, four years later, the film version that won Sissy Spacek an Academy Award for best actress — brought Ms. Lynn to the attention of a much wider audience. In 2004, her collaboration with Mr. White on the album “Van Lear Rose” brought her before a wider audience still. That year they went on the David Letterman Show and absolutely killed it.
Ms. Lynn never considered herself a feminist, and in fact expressly rejected the label, but in her songs she advocated for the very empowerment the women’s movement sought to achieve. In her memoir, she is even more direct, defending abortion rights, standing up for her lesbian fans and arguing for greater choice and opportunity in every context. Throughout her career in an industry that remains dominated by men, she was a great champion of new female artists.
All of which is why I jumped — literally jumped up and down — at the chance to interview Ms. Lynn in 2010, and it’s why that interview remains one of the highlights of my professional life. I loved her songs and her life story, but an hour of talking with her was all it took for me to love Ms. Lynn herself. It was also all it took for me to feel, remarkably, unbelievably, loved in return. How can you not feel loved by someone who offers to take you to the Grammys on her tour bus? Someone who ends the conversation by saying, “Well, I love you”?
In 2014, I got to hear Loretta Lynn in concert at the Ryman Auditorium, the mother church of country music. That night, the patter of the warm-up act made me deeply uneasy — drunk-guy jokes that could’ve gotten ugly, elliptical references to President Barack Obama that came very close to open racism. But Loretta herself said nothing of the kind, and Mr. Obama had just given her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, after all. Well, I thought, these people don’t speak for Loretta anyway.
When Ms. Lynn announced in 2016 that she was supporting Donald Trump for president, I almost cried. What I didn’t know then was how often this experience would be played out in the following months and years for me and for so many other liberals down here, and in much more personal contexts.
Many a white liberal in the South has a granny — or a mother, or an aunt, or a sister, or a neighbor — just like Loretta Lynn, someone they admire and adore, someone who has earned their love and admiration. Their love is complicated, not obviated, by the fact that the people they love routinely walk into the voting booth and pull the lever for chaos.
“It is easy to simplify all this into contradictions,” is how Marissa R. Moss, the author of “Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be,” put it in New York Magazine, “but it was only a contradiction if you thought you knew and understood women, specifically rural, Appalachian, or Southern women. Lynn was complex, not a contradiction.”
Human complexity is surely why the singer-songwriter Rissi Palmer, host of the “Color Me Country” radio show, wrote on Twitter, “The Morgan Wades, Carly Pierces, and Mickey Guytons of the world (all of us really) would not have been possible without Loretta. She said things that were unthinkable coming from women artists. Her honesty made it possible for ALL of us to be honest fearlessly.”
In the end, it comes down to love. Whatever the vitriol online might suggest, we are still capable of loving one another through profound differences and irreconcilable disagreements. And when we manage to keep on loving, and keep on listening, we can sometimes, maybe, bring our loved ones around to a new way of thinking.
No one knew that power better than Loretta Lynn, who spoke the truth of her own life so other women wouldn’t feel so alone. She helped make the world better for them, and she brought at least one homesick Alabama girl home to stay.
Godspeed, Miss Loretta. I love you, too.
(Courtesy of Heidi Ross) Margaret Renkl
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.