The coal miner's daughter has been a grandmother now, oh, 50 years now -- but the voice that made her country music's most decorated and revered female artist has only improved with age.
Full Circle, Loretta Lynn's first full album in nearly a dozen years, arrived Friday. It's proof positive that with loving care and proper maintenance, the human voice can develop a golden, mellow patina. In the right hands, it can express all the decades of experience, all the heartache and joy, that a much younger performer could never effect.
Lynn has recorded something like 70 albums since Loretta Lynn Sings in 1963, including Van Lear Rose, a 2004 collaboration with Jack White that won a Grammy for Best Country Album and re-introduced her to a new generation.
Her sassy, Tennessee-inflected style has changed precious little over more than six decades of recording; put on Coal Miner's Daughter (1970) next to Full Circle, and the only immediately noticeable difference is the production quality.
A deeper listen reveals something more: If anything, a bit of the brassy edge has come off Lynn's voice, giving way to a golden tremolo that we can only hope will keep developing for many years to come.
But she can still push it. A re-interpretation of Fist City, which Lynn wrote and recorded in 1968, is every bit as feisty as it was back then:
For the most part, Full Circle's 14 tracks are an elegant mix of timeless traditionals (In the Pines), gospel (Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven), country staples (Always on My Mind, Wine into Water) and a couple of originals, including duets with Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson.
In fact, the latter is the highlight of the record; fellow octogenarian Nelson's voice has itself taken on a different character at 82. The combination of him and Lynn on Lay Me Down, an introspective on making peace with impending mortality, is a bona fide goosebump-raiser.
To think that life can be as rich and artful as this, eight decades and more in, is heady and inspiring on its own. But in this song, written and interpreted by two of country's truest titans, there is magic to the twilight of it all.
There's nothing sonically fancy about Full Circle, recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and produced by Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash. Each of these simple, gentle country songs is presented in raw form: just some stellar pickers and players in a room. That gives Full Circle a warm, present humanity you'll never find in the pitch-polished world of contemporary recorded music.
If Full Circle is to be Lynn's last -- may she live to record many more -- it will stand not only as a fine retrospective on a career defined by exploring personal hardships through the Appalachian sounds into which she was born, but also as a testament to music as an art form in which one can participate for the entirety of life.
And that is inspiring indeed.
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