PG | 2 h 4 min | Drama, Musical, Biopic | 1980
If you look at today’s pop, rock, or R&B charts, you may imagine that country music, America’s staple music diet for over a century, is dying. Only, you’d be wrong. The Country Music Association reports a 9 percent growth in listenership annually, more performance-venues than other genres, and spiking listenership nationally, well beyond traditional South and Southeastern markets.
Several sub-genres of country music led to its 20th-century flowering, even if the Nashville sound dominated for decades. Then, tragic plane crashes tore two stars from fans in their thrall: Patsy Cline in 1963 and Jim Reeves in 1964. As if in defiance, a third star grew in their wake: younger, but no less resilient. Through a career spanning six decades, three-time Grammy-winner Loretta Lynn carried their legacy into the 21st century.
Michael Apted’s film “Coal Miner’s Daughter” pays tribute to Lynn, drawing on her long track record of hits and the autobiography of the same name.
In Kentucky’s coal country, Lynn (Sissy Spacek) grows up poor, and then throws herself into a tumultuous marriage to Doolittle (Tommy Lee Jones). Inspired by him, she finds her voice, moves to Washington, teaches herself the guitar, beats stage-fear, then hits the road with songs she writes and performs. Still in her 30s, with six children in tow, she becomes country music royalty. Cline (Beverly D’Angelo) serves as Lynn’s muse and mentor.
Cinematographer Ralf Bode shows you the petite Lynn jostling for space in a studio so cramped that it feels like the accompanists are perched on each other’s laps. You see her confidence as an artist swell with age and experience, as her taut smiles give way to wide open grins: first before neighbors and friends in Kentucky, then before Nashville producers, and finally before thousands of fans across America. You see her coping with rehearsals and recordings, concerts in pouring rain, crazed fans, recurring headaches, and sleepless nights on cross-country bus rides.
To extract that lived-in spontaneity, Bode and Apted watched the actors rehearse, then set up the camera and shot around what they saw, instead of how they expected the actors to conform to their preconceived notions of scene structure. A quintessential outsider, the very British Apted, ends up conveying an insider’s view of one of America’s great cultural movements.
Lynn handpicked Spacek to play Lynn. Spacek, spooked at having to play a legend who was still alive, asked Lynn to do her own singing in the hope that that would convince filmmakers to let her go. Thankfully, they weren’t fooled. With some offscreen guidance from Lynn and Lynn’s music producer Owen Bradley (who scores the film), Spacek sang Lynn’s songs herself, and won a Best Actress Oscar and a Grammy nomination.
Lynn and Doolittle helped the actors acquire authenticity; Spacek shadowed Lynn for months, to pick up her micro-mannerisms, and speaking and singing style. And D’Angelo sang Cline’s songs herself.
Doolittle’s Big Role
Apted took time to show you Lynn’s deprivation in her childhood.Because her doting parents had so many children, even as a teen Lynn ends up playing mother to her numerous siblings; half-smiling, she later sang one’s “a-bawling,” one’s “a-toddling,” one’s “a-crawling,” and one’s “on the way.”
Lynn’s father stretches his meager pay just to buy her a dress. He warns against playing the radio too long; they can’t afford new batteries. The family has to raise chickens and pigs to supplement her father’s earnings. So her parting with her father as she heads to her new life is heartbreaking.
For all his drinking, volatility, and waywardness, Doolittle stills when he hears Lynn sing. He sees something special in her that she doesn’t. He slogs along in work so he can provide for their increasingly large family (eventually six children).
He buys her first guitar, presses her to sing at bars, town-halls, and radio stations, pesters DJs to play her songs, then chauffeurs her countrywide to distribute promo-photos he’s taken of her and tapes he’s recorded.
Doolittle reminds Lynn that their struggle to the top is only half the battle, “Getting here’s one thing and being here’s another.” For all Lynn’s real-life rebellions, it seems she loved him deeply, staying married for 50 years until his death.
Starting with her hit “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” Lynn’s songs of love, longing, and loss struck a chord with the working class, which was captured hauntingly in her other hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter”:
“We were poor, but we had love … my Daddy … He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar … Mummy scrubbed our clothes on a washboard … I’ve seen her fingers bleed. To complain there was no need.”
Lynn’s song, released about the same time as Merle Haggard’s classic “Hungry Eyes,” drips with the same pathos about stoic parents who gave up their dreams so that their children could live theirs. When Lynn gushes her thanks to applauding fans, you kind of guess who she’s really thanking.
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