br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
:ast night I ram my husband Charles and I the 1980 biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, directed by Michael Apted (a British director and an odd choice for a biopic of a country-music legend, but he turned in a magnificent job) from a script by Tom Rickman based on the autobiography of coal miner’s daughter turned country-music superstar Loretta Lynn. The producers hired actress Sissy Spacek to play Loretta Lynn and Tommy Lee Jones for her husband Doolittle Lynn, universally nicknamed either “Doo” or “Mooney.” They also allowed Spacek and Beverly D’Angelo, who played Lynn’s mentor Patsy Cline, to do their own singing for the film. I first saw Coal Miner’s Daughter during its initial theatrical run with my then-girlfriend Cat, her mother and stepfather, Charles had seen it on TV before but neither of us had encountered this movie in any form until last night, when I ran a DVD of it as part of an “inspirational” two-film pack from Universal along with the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, an even weirder choice for the so-called “faith-based” audience. Producer Bernard Schwartz (not the same Bernard Schwartz as the actor who became a movie star as Tony Curtis) made some inspired casting decisions, including having Levon Helm, drummer of The Band, play Loretta’s father, Ted Webb (who died of black lung disease at age 52 after relocating to Indiana with his wife and their younger children, including Brenda Gail Webb, who would become a country star herself as Crystal Gayle); casting Ernest Tubb as himself even though it had already been 20 years since he’d introduced Lynn on her first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry; and hiring Owen Brtadley, who had produced Loretta Lynn’s original records (and those of Patsy Cline as well), to produce the soundtrack recordings as well.
When I first saw Coal Miner’s Daughter I was stunned at how beautifully it brought to life the entire rural culture of the American South – or at least that part of it Loretta Lynn came from. It was a world of dangerous hard work, low pay, men who paid lip service to traditional Chistian morality while spending their nights drinking and whoring, and women who had to figure out how to keep themselves and their children fed on what was left of their husbands’ pay after they came home from a night of drinking and whoring. When Loretta Webb and Doolittle Lynn got married, she was only 15 and her parents had to give their consent (which they did only reluctantly; Loretta’s mom essentially throws her arms in the air and says, “You’re gonna get together anyway”), and at least according to this film one sore point of contention was that Doolittle showed up to the wedding without a ring, and she begged him on one for years. At one point he bought her a guitar instead of a ring,and insisted she teach herself how to play it – this was at a time when the Lynns were living in Washington state, mainly because Doolittle didn’t want to get stuck working in the coal mines in Butcher Holler (“holler” is just Appalachian mountain-speak for “valley”), getting black lung and dying of it at an early age the way his father-in-law would. He got her a job singing with a local country band in Washington and then pulled together enough money for her to make a first record, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.”As depicted in the movie, the session was originally supposed to be a vanity project funded by Doolittle Lynn, but when the recording began the producer called a halt and told the Lynns he was going to hire additional musicians because he was impressed with Loretta’s voice and thought she deserved a better backing than she’d get from Doolittle’s players. (Loretta Lynn's Wikipedia page has a rather different account of this first session: it says Doolittle had already extended his budget to the max hiring the best players he could find.)
The two Lynns left their five children with her mother and set out on the road to market and promote their record to radio stations.Their back-breaking work got Loretta’s record on enough stations that it got to #14 on the country charts and won her a contract with a major label, Decca, and a connection with their great country producer, Owen Bradley. Loretta also formed a friendship with Patsy Cline (also a Decca artist who was produced by Owen Bradley), an established star who took Loretta under her wing, toured with her and encouraged her to wear makeup on stage – much to Doolittle’s anger. When the two singers first meet Patsy is just recovering from a car accident and Loretta is awestruck over meeting the already established star. (The scene of their meeting is accompanied by “Crazy,” the hit song the young Willie Nelson wrote for Patsy Cline.) Pregnant again – one of the most moving elements of the film is Loretta’s near-total ignorance about sex on her wedding night – Lynn goes through a box of Cline’s own clothes, including stage outfits Cline wore during her own pregnancies, and promises to take Loretta shopping as soon as she returns from a benefit concert she’s flying out to Kansas City to perform. As just about anybody witn even a passing familiarity with the history of country music knows, Patsy Cline never made it to that Kansas City gig: she died in a private plane crash on the way, and according to this movie Loretta Lynn heard about the death of her mentor and close friend when she was awakened by a country radio station playing Cline’s hit “Sweet Dreams,” following which the D.J. announced that he was playing it as a memorial.
Though she didn’t invent the feminist streak in country music – that honor is usually given to Kitty Wells, who in 1952 recorded an “answer song” to Hank Thompson’s “The Other Side of Life” called “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” which outsold the record it was an answer to, though the great and traqgically underrated Rose Maddox was recording independent-minded pro-feminist country songs even before Wells did (Maddox’s 1948 record “You’ve Been Talking ini Your Sleep” – in which she says she’s heard her husband talking in his sleep and giving endearments to a woman who isn’t her – sounded so much like a Loretta Lynn song it surprised me that Lynn never covered it) – Loretta Lynn was a trail-blazer in calling out cheating husbands and denouncing the women they cheated with. A number of her songs were so explicit in their attacks on the so-called “double standard” that even at the height of her popularity, many country stations wouldn’t play them. Perhaps her most audacious song – and one that was left off her “All-Time Greatest Hits” CD – was “The Pill,” in which she proudly proclaims her decision to use birth control so her husband doesn’t keep sticking her with more kids to raise.
Lynn stood up for women’s equality in country music in other ways, too. At a time when it was assumed that male country stars (including the three men who did more than any other males to create country music as a form, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash) could build their careers on original material, women would need the help of professional songwriters, Loretta Lynn not only wrote many of her songs herself but proudly boasted about it. She even put out an album in the early 1970’s called Loretta Lynn Writes ‘Em and Sings ‘Em. Coal Miner’s Daughter holds up as a beautiful tribute to an American legend, and while part of me wishes they had got Loretta Lynn to record the soundtrack herself (as they did two years later when they made a biopic of Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams, in which Jessica Lange played her but Cline’s own records were heard on the soundtrack), both Spacek and D’Angelo sing their hearts out and are completely convincing as professional singers. In fact, I’d rank Coal Miner’s Daughter as the best movie ever made about a major country musician, the way I’d rate Abel Gance’s 1936 Beethoven as the best film ever made about a major classical composer, Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1987) as the best film ever made about a major jazz musician, and Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) the best film about a major rock band.
