'Don't Come Home Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)

I’ve wanted this album for a long while (I couldn't find it for about a year and I eventually discovered an LP for a reasonable price in Amazon) for several reasons:

1. I was a relatively large Loretta Lynn fan stemming mostly from her duets with Conway Twitty.

2. It’s by far the most awesome album title.

Lynn a straight-shooting country princess just looking for a guy to stay true and at least a little sober every once in a while. She tells us this all in under three minutes.

Voices like Lynn make me wonder where the country and western female fits in the grand scheme of this great struggle of the sexes, especially in popular art. I’m not entirely familiar with the work of, say, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone or the other early jazz singers. I feel that rock female artists such as Janis Joplin or Grace Slick were too carnal – they tried to be a man in a man’s world.

Early R&B and Motown would often get attitudinal (“R-E-S-P-E-C-T”), but never did they ruffle too many feathers and they would get angry one minute and pretty forgiving the next.
Gals like Lynn were fed up. They didn’t dig their men cheating, carousing and drinking. And they were apt to throw it back right in the man’s face by going out and getting some herself.

From Patsy Cline up through the 1970s, country and western women knew only of heartbreak and disappointment. In all, they captured the toil and work of the American woman more than any other genre.