“Work” is maybe putting too neat of a bow onto what I actually mean, when considering the vast body of Loretta Lynn’s work. I mean that a life is something you earn, and there is no failure in how you earn the life you have, because it is yours. And there is no failure in what you choose to leave behind, because what you choose to leave behind won’t serve you and so it must be forgotten. You can earn the ability to love, and so you can earn the broken heart. You can earn your loneliness and you can love it, too, because the men are still no-good and they ain’t getting any better. You can earn your longing, and you can earn a heart that wants to surrender, again, to a world that handles it without generosity. You can earn your drinks at a bar where people know to leave you be. A whole town that goes quiet at night. A moon that lights a pathway just for you and no one else.
It was all there in the songs of Loretta Lynn. Songs about what women not just desired, but needed, to survive. Songs about never wanting to love again pressed up against songs about falling in love. She sung the lonely songs better the older she got, which some people might consider sad but I consider necessary. Enough decades of life suggests that one might begin to take an inventory of her aches and regrets, the absences that have been planted through the years and have grown only wider as the clock winds down.
“I’m Dying for Someone to Live For” from the 2018 album “Wouldn’t It Be Great” is Ms. Lynn at her most heartbreaking but also her most surgically brilliant, as a writer of rich, transportive quality. The listener is there, present with her, overlooking an empty landscape, taking inventory of all of its sounds and movements and weighing the burdens of our own hearts against whatever small mercy from the natural world arrives in an attempt to keep us company. The weeping willow, the tide, gently pulling the hair of the shoreline.
“There’s a whippoorwill out on a limb / I know I’m more lonesome than him,” so the song goes. And I believe it. The best Loretta Lynn songs could convince me of anything. I could be in love and briefly believe myself lonely. I could be lonely, and, for a moment, I’d believe I’d never be alone again.
I’ve given up on the myth that anyone will live forever, at least on this side of living, the one we all know is promised for at least a little while. And so I have already mourned the world that wouldn’t hold Loretta Lynn. I have mourned it for years, knowing what I know of time.
I know that Loretta Lynn got the letter I dropped off, and I was told she read it. I never wanted anything in return. Halfway through writing it, I’d abandoned the interview ask. Instead, I wrote to her about birds — how I loved writing about birds, and how she seemed to love writing about birds. I sent her a poem of mine, about an albatross. I told her I’d adored the imagery of birds that appeared in her songs for decades, the way she used the bird as a type of portal. Snowbirds and whippoorwills and bluebirds, like the bluebird in the song “I Wanna Be Free” from her 1971 album of the same name. The bluebird, in that song, singing to her, outside her window, beckoning her to fly away with it. Her baby had left her and everything was dying, but there was this bird, telling her it knew the way to freedom.
She rerecorded a version of “I Wanna Be Free” for her final living album, 2021’s “Still Woman Enough.” Her voice was more strained, more uneven. But still, she hit a ramp of vocal excitement in the moment where the song greets the bird and the moment directly after, where she sings, “well you know I think I’m a gonna live / gotta lotta love left in my heart to give.”