4 thoughts on “Loretta Lynn – To Make a Man (Feel Like a Man) / Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)”

1. Stage banter that may not sit well with contemporary ears aside, Loretta was such a special artist. She wrote & sang songs that certainly challenged & exposed the assumptions, beliefs, & hypocrisies of some in her audiences: songs like “Dear Uncle Sam” (a hit anti-Vietnam song on Country radio in 1966), “The Pill” (1975), “Hey Loretta,” “One’s on the Way” (which she sang, without dodging its reference to birth control pills, on The Muppet Show), “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” and the second one featured here.

   Not many artists have the courage of their convictions to sing songs like that to an audience that is unwilling to discuss or is outright hostile to the ideas in them. But Loretta did.

   1. Not many artists have the courage of their convictions to sing songs like that to an audience that is unwilling to discuss or is outright hostile to the ideas in them. But Loretta did.

      But were they hostile back then? I know they would be now. Country music had much more of a message behind it back then.

      Nashville would hate Johnny Cash if he came along now. He'd be labeled as a massive liberal.

      1. Loretta’s label seems to have thought so — she recorded “The Pill” in 1972, but the label sat on it for three years. This was during a period (1966–1974) when she released 20 Top 5 hits. “The Pill” was banned by Country stations, and Loretta claimed in an interview that the Grand Ole Opry debated for three hours about whether to allow her to sing it in an appearance. The song certainly appealed to some portions of her audience (it hit #5 on the Country charts, and crossed over to hit #70 on the Billboard Hot 100), but there was clear resistance from both institutions and other listeners.

         As for “Dear Uncle Sam,” she released that right between the Goldwater and Nixon elections. Goldwater won his home state and five states in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina). George Wallace won four of those states (all except South Carolina) plus Arkansas in ‘68, while Nixon won the rest of the South except Texas, which went to Humphrey. By 1972, Nixon had sewed up Goldwater’s 1964 fracturing of the Solid South with his own Southern Strategy. I don’t recall Goldwater or Nixon being doves, and I wouldn’t guess many of their voters were, either.

2. I did not know that Crystal Gayle was her sister, nor what a big influence Patsy Cline was in her life.

   Ms. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, and Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.

   “After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”

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