My Great Appreciation for Madame Loretta Lynn came through my late Grandmother,
Annie Evans who passed but a couple of years ago in her mid 90’s.
Grandma was the daughter of a full blooded Cherokee woman (who for some reason known only to her & the ancestors loved chasing me around the yard in Daytona Beach Florida with a switch while expecting me to remain still so that she could discipline me seemingly just for existing) & a man also of Native & West Indian blood.
My Grannie, like many of her time & place, had her first child at 15, her last at 18, whereby she then threw her husband out of the house & proclaimed that she would raise & feed her babies without him. And with one baby in her orange sack, another on her hip & the other beneath the orange trees, she’d pick the fruit that fed the 3 children of her family. Madame Loretta too had Cherokee stock, as I’ve come to notice a great many of Country Music’s elite had also. She too had her babies beginning at 15 at a time when the women had few options available to them & did what was expected of them by a rigid male culture.
Then she went on to turn her music culture on its ear. Where after, it was never quite the same as were it before.
My Grannie was tough, blunt, direct & always willing to call a spade as the shape she saw it. And few could escape her cynical but sagacious eye. She didn’t much like white people, but the ones she did like, she loved. She didn’t like Jews, except for the lady for whom she worked for much of her adult life & with whom she were as close as peas in a can. She didn’t much trust black people, except for her very close friends, who were few, & excepting her best friend, a Puerto Rican woman who lived next door to her, she thought most Latins were too conflicted to bother with. And she thought that most religious types were full of shit.
She pretty much hated everyone with an equal dollop of disdain.
But wasn’t nearly as mean as her own mama was, though she was undoubtedly trained by her to be suspicious of anyone who wasn’t family.
But she loved Brook Benton, Billy Eckstine, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Jim Reeves, & Loretta Lynn. She were also fond of Johnny Cash, Otis Redding & Tammy Wynette. And I’m sure there were more than a few others of whom I had no knowledge of. The passing of Madame Loretta brought all of these memories to mind. Even with me Grannie could be a bit abrasive yet she was my hero in many ways exactly BECAUSE she was so succinct & clear. She was also quite protective of what light she recognized shining forth from the cracks in the brickwork that shielded my soul from the elemental brutalities surrounding the penumbra of my spirit. And we shared a passionate love of Baseball, Flip Wilson, Laugh In, Hee Haw, & Bonanza.
And when even my own parents would yield to authorities admonition of my uniqueness, Grannie would instead (in her own way) advise those same authorities to fuck off & recognize. She hated bullies & authoritarian flexing as do I to this very day.
May both the Madame Loretta & my Grannie Annie Rest In the Fullness of the Mercies that Await those who Put their Time In, Walking these Fields of Harvest, Collecting their Earnest Stalks of Grain.
Sananda Maitreya !
Wednesday, Oct 5 2022.
Milano, Italia.
#LorettaLynn
© Sananda Maitreya for TreeHouse Publishing, October 5th 2022.