'YOU HAVE TO WRITE FROM THE HEART'

By GEORGE LENKERA
Few country music purists probably raised their eyebrows when Loretta Lynn hired rocker Jack White to produce her 2004 CD, "Van Lear Rose," but they need not have worried.

"It is the most country album I ever made," Lynn said with a laugh in a telephone interview last week. "The rock guy came in and made it a lot more country than any other record I've done."

Lynn will perform songs from the album, as well as many others from her legendary 40-plus year career, at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton on Thursday.


No one should have been surprised that Lynn decided to collaborate with White, whose fame comes from his hard blues-rock guitar work with The White Stripes. After all, Lynn has made a career of brave choices and controversial songs.

"With everything I've done, I've tried to do something different, and still make it No. 1," she said.

Lynn certainly was different than many of her country music peers. In the 1960s she released "Dear Uncle Sam," a song bemoaning a husband sent off to Vietnam, and in the 1970s, she wrote and sang "The Pill," about the freedom birth control provided women. The song featured this clever and then-controversial lyric:

"But all I've seen of this old world Is a bed and a doctor bill I'm tearin' down your brooder house 'Cause now I've got the pill."

Both songs were Top 10 hits on the Billboard country chart and Lynn said she never gave a second thought to how people would react to her lyrics.

"I never even dreamed those songs wouldn't succeed. I just figured people would like it," she said. "You have to write from heart; if I can't feel it I can't write it."

Besides working with White, Lynn has also done quite a few other collaborations and has appeared as a vocalist on numerous friends' records. She half-joked that she just may just call in a few of those favors soon to help her with her next record.

"Just about everybody calls me and I end up being on their albums, but then it's all you get done. It seems like I've been on everybody's album there is," she said with a chuckle. "I ought to get everyone to come in for my next album and then it won't be so hard to make."

Although she has been asked to sing on many records, Lynn sees herself primarily as a writer. She composed most of her songs right from the start and wrote or co-wrote all of the songs on "Van Lear Rose."

"The first record I ever cut I wrote all the songs because I didn't know any other way to do it. I thought everybody did it that way," she said. "I like writing better than I do singing anyway."

But even though she has always been a great writer, she came to the spotlight as the successor to her friend and mentor, country legend Patsy Cline, who died in a plane crash in 1963. Lynn was never daunted by the prospect of making it big, however.

"Well, I had dreams and I figured you don't start out to hit bottom, you start out to hit top," she said.

Lynn also doesn't shy away from the public eye and wonders why other performers do. She said she kept her name on her tour bus even though other artists had removed theirs.

"People asked me why I do it and I said, 'When you stop promoting yourself, you might as well quit the business.' Some singers are afraid people will bother them or try to talk to them, but if that bothers them they should probably just stay home," she said, laughing.


 

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