At 67, She’s Survived It All

When Country Music Hall of Famer Loretta Lynn came down with pneumonia last spring, as far as most people knew at the time, Lynn included, she thought the most serious consequence was that she had to cancel several concerts. Only after she had recovered did Lynn find out that the strain of bacterial pneumonia that she’d had was life-threatening.

“I was in the hospital for 13 days, and for about six or seven days the doctors thought I was gonna die,” says Lynn, who makes up one of those canceled dates on Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Irvine. “Well, I couldn’t let that happen,” the feisty 67-year-old singer adds.

The fighter’s spirit that has long characterized her place in the world of country music was undamaged by her hospital stay. She did, however, suffer a punctured lung that permanently reduced the singer’s lung capacity.

“Now I have to try to breathe real deep and let it out slow, but outside of that, I’m OK,” she says.

Her illness struck just a few months after she’d returned to touring following almost a dozen years out of the music business, a time she spent caring for her ailing husband and manager, Oliver “Doo” Mooney, who died in 1995.

Last fall, she released her first new album since the late 1980s, “Still Country.” It included several songs that addressed the profound loss of the man she married when she was 13, who bought her her first guitar and who, in the words of the album’s centerpiece, “I Can’t Hear the Music,” “was my toughest critic and my biggest fan.”

“When you’re married at 13 and you are together for so long, it’s so hard,” she says, speaking haltingly as she struggles to get the words out.

It didn’t hit her until after the album was done that she had gravitated toward so many songs about loss. “When I started listening to it,” Lynn says, “if it had been someone else singing I would have thought, ‘That person has lost someone.’

“It’s been almost six years that I’ve lost him, and I don’t think you ever get over it. You may someday have a companion, but I think you’ll always love the one you love. I kinda think when you fall in love with someone, you never love anybody else. Heck, I was 13 years old--I didn’t know what love was.” After pausing, she adds, “But I guess maybe I did.”

Returning to music after so many years wasn’t easy, even for an artist of Lynn’s stature. After her first single in 1960, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” she charted 51 Top 10 country hits, 16 of them reaching No. 1, up through “I Still Believe in Waltzes,” a 1981 hit with her frequent duet partner, Conway Twitty.

Along the way, Lynn redefined women’s place in country music and often broke its musical and thematic conventions, with songs she wrote about philandering (“Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ With Lovin’ on Your Mind”), societal conventions about femininity (“Fist City”) and family planning (“The Pill”). She also defied tradition by bringing drums into her band at a time when the music was predominantly played on acoustic string instruments.

Now, like many country veterans, she’s facing an environment in which virtually all attention is focused on young, photogenic performers who sing cheery tales of love and romance. That’s a striking turnabout from the stories of hardscrabble rural life that Lynn often wrote, most famously in her signature hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” about her upbringing in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky.

“Today, everything’s a little bit dry--you know, bland,” Lynn says. “Five years from now, who’s going to remember most of these songs?”

Still, she doesn’t criticize singers whose records sound more pop than country. “I love Faith Hill, and she says that what she wants to do is pop,” she says. “But if she’s pop, they shouldn’t put her on country radio.

“I love all kinds of singers--I’ve sung with Pavarotti, I’ve sung with Frank Sinatra. But that don’t mean I’m them. I’m country.”

At the same time, she doesn’t want to see the clock turned back either. “Some of the artists are going clear back into acoustic music, using fiddles, plain old guitar and upright bass. They’re going back to the barnyard again.”

What’s most important to Lynn is keeping songs rooted in real life.

“I’m still a honky-tonk songwriter,” she says. “Some people have told me, ‘You’re too old to write honky-tonk songs.’ But when you’re married with children, you do what you do and you write the way you write.

“I was never hung up on a cheesy love song. I always wrote about honky-tonks. I had to go through all that. My husband drank and I lived it, and you have to live what you write.”

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Loretta Lynn plays Monday at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 71 Fortune, Irvine. 8 p.m. $20 to $98. (949) 585-9000.