And when she had those shows, all kinds of people still packed the halls.
“You know, at times there will be middle-aged people, and there will be quite a few older people. But mostly my crowds are mixed, and they’re from 3 years old to 90. And I treat them all the same because all of us knows how old I am, and we all get together and talk about our age. Even onstage, we holler backwards and forwards, ‘Well, you ain’t as old as I am,’ and blah, blah, blah. So we have a good time with every show. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your age sure ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.”
Lynn was re-recording a lot of her oldest songs at the time, from the first song she ever wrote, “Whispering Sea,” to “Fist City,” in part to obtain mechanical rights for those recordings.
“Well, I’ve got a whole house full of kids and grandkids, and I’m doing a lot of this for them. Of course, I ain’t going nowhere for a long time. I feel good. I feel great. I thank God every day that I’m in good condition. I’ve never drank or smoked, you know. Never mistreated my body in any way, so I’m in great shape.”
I asked her about her earliest days, when she was befriended by Patsy Cline, who was instrumental in getting her Decca records catalogue.
“I was brand new, you know,” Lynn said. “I just walked in to Nashville. Ernest Tubb let me sing at his record shop, and I was there when I found out that Patsy had been in a wreck, and she was in the hospital. So while I was in the record shop, I sang, ‘I Fall to Pieces’ for Patsy.”
She only realized later it was probably a poor choice to sing.
“Now, if I had any sense, I wouldn’t have sung that song, because she’s laying in the hospital, and it looked like she fell all to pieces. She had been in that wreck. I wouldn’t have sung that song if I had any sense – I would have sung another one. But, of course, I didn’t have much sense at that time.
“But,” she added, “Patsy sent her husband to find me, and he found me coming out of the record shop and said, ‘Patsy wants to see you.’ The relationship started right then, and we were together until she passed away, which wasn’t very long, you know. Patsy wasn’t around too long, maybe a year or two years, something like that. But she was the only girlfriend I had at the time. And then I had to start getting girlfriends, because I didn’t have any friends at that time. I had to make friends.”
Lynn reached some of her greatest success by writing her own songs that connected with people because they were so direct, and often addressing subjects that others had not, like the birth control pill.
“Yeah,” she said. “’The Pill,’ and ‘One’s on the Way.’ They were the ones that really gave me a rough time. And I didn’t understand that, because everybody was taking the pill. I didn’t have the money to take it when they put it out, but I couldn’t understand why they were raising such a fuss over taking the pill.
“And with ‘One’s on the Way,’ I thought everybody had a baby. I sure did. I didn’t think anybody else was too good to.”
The first strong reactions came from radio stations hesitant to play it.
“Well, some of the disc jockeys were afraid to play it, because there would be somebody telling them, ‘Oh, they’ll ban her record. Somebody else will ban it,’ and a disk jockey wouldn’t play it,” Lynn said. “But they got to where they found out that everybody was playing it, and so they all started playing it.”
I couldn’t resist asking about the elaborate beaded gowns she would always wear in concert.
“I wouldn’t go on the stage without my gowns, for nothing,” she said. “I love my gowns, and I ain’t about to not wear them. I love them.”
But weren’t they especially heavy to wear?
“Well, they’re heavy, but, hey,” she said, “work ain’t easy.”