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The country music titan Loretta Lynn died this month at 90. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she was a chart regular, singing — and often writing — songs about the circumstances of women’s lives, even as she resisted being claimed by the emergent feminist movement.
She performed crucial duets about collapsing relationships, underscored the challenges faced by divorced women and sang about the arrival of the birth control pill. She was a vivid chronicler of growing up hardscrabble in Butcher Holler, Ky. And she was one of the genre’s great vocal stylists, delivering heartbreak and sternness with equal aplomb.
On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lynn’s sly radicalism and the way she was initially received by the country music industry, the many readings and misreadings of her work, and the manner in which legends age in public.
