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In the beginning -- it was just a guitar and a dream... |
Coal Miner’s Daughter
was on
television earlier today. I watched a
great deal of it with
Kelly
and
Jim.
I always have mixed feelings when I watch that movie. I realize that for many,
it’s a glimpse into a foreign world, a different time, a different place.
In this high-fangled internet age, it must seem like sociological excavation
– a foray and primer on rural poverty and country music. For me, it’s
a glimpse of my family’s history.
Loretta Lynn is actually a few years
younger than my mother. And while she wasn’t married at 13, and while
she did finish high school (a year early), my mother was a young woman in the
1950s in rural Kentucky. My mother had a small college scholarship, but wasn’t
allowed to go. Instead she worked at a car dealership and married my dad in
1950 and had four kids over the next twenty years. She did have a job, which
was a rarity among the farm women in our part of the country. But she still
had to tend to my grannie, help my dad with the cows and the farm, take care
of kids, tend to her own parents, work a full-time job, and eek out some small
corner of the world that was hers.
My folks had it very rough growing up and as newlyweds. My grandparents (on
both sides) never had indoor plumbing. For the first 18 years of their marriage,
neither did my parents. Electricity was just starting to reach rural Kentucky
in the 1950s. Indoor plumbing was a luxury and my folks saved enough over two
decades to have it installed in 1968-69. I think that life for so many people
in the rural south was, and probably still is, a constant lesson in hardship,
adversity, trouble and strife. Growing up on a diary and tobacco farm is hard
work. The cows get milked twice a day. Every day. Cows don’t go on vacation.
And neither did we.
So, back to Loretta Lynn. By the time she was 21, she had four kids, had been
married seven or so years and then, one day, she started singing. Coal mining
stole her loved one’s lives, her husband was a
mean drunk and she had all
these hollering kids. What else was there for her to do?
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| My siblings in 1969. |
The era of Coal Miner’s Daughter isn’t a distant memory for me.
As the baby of the family, I was spoiled. I pretty much got to be a kid. My
grandparents were all dead, save one, by the time I was four and my parents
never really made me do anything too horrible as far as chores. And the amenities
of town life existed by the time I made my way into the world. I didn’t
have to haul water from the spring just to have water, string green beans ‘til
my fingers bled, hoe the garden ‘til I was sun burnt. I didn’t have
to use an out house or have a weekly bath in a wash tub. But it’s right
on the verge of almost having been a reality for me. And there’s a complex
blend of relief and guilt that goes with it. I wonder if I’d be a different
person if I’d spent my childhood with my grannie killing chickens and
canning beans like my siblings did. I wonder what I’d be like if my childhood
hadn’t been filled with drawing and reading and imagination, and had instead
been filled with daily, grueling farm work and with the occasional trip to the
creek to go fishing with my grandpa. I’m not saying I would not be gay
if things had been different, but maybe less gay? differently gay?
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My dad in 1949.
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So, really, what the hell does any of this have to do with Loretta Lynn? I
started reading her
lyrics
after watching the movie and I started thinking about her life and these words
and the impact that her singing and writing had on people. She gave a voice
to women like
my
mother and grandmother, she presented options to young women
like
my sisters and she gave budding drag queens, like me,
a
little dose of hairspray later on. I’m not sure she did much for my
brother. But he had KISS, which also inspired the budding drag queen, but that’s
way off subject.
Country music was more than just entertainment for my parents and grandparents
generation. I think it was also part commentary and part collective therapy.
I think their lives pretty much sucked, with the poverty and the dirt roads
and the cow shit and the outhouses and the coal dust….the list of crap
they dealt with just goes on and on.
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| And
now -- Kennedy Center Honors for Loretta Lynn, as well as James Brown,
Itzhak Perlman, Carol Burnett and Mike Nichols. |
For many, country people are viewed as substandard – and they have been
relegated to hick jokes and “You Know You’re a Redneck When….”
e-mails. I’m guilty of the same bias at times. When my southern accent
slips out, I cringe. I just hope that when I am home this week with my family
for Christmas, that I spend my time not being embarrassed of my family’s
history. I think there’s far more dignity and courage and resolve there
than I ever imagined.
READ MORE HERE
Loretta's
Lyrics
Loretta
talks about the White Stripes
Lorretta's Website
Posted December 21, 2003 08:55 PM
