“He never made me feel like I was a dumb hillbilly just because I said ‘ain’t’ or ‘holler.’ Owen said people would always understand me, so long as I was myself.” He was right: They did. “‘Just pronounce the words the way you want, Loretta.’ That’s what Owen told me,” she recounted in her memoir. He also encouraged Lynn to never clean up her from-the-holler drawl. At that point, Bradley had been her trusted collaborator, “like a father to me,” Lynn said. While on “The Pill,” she’s wearing miniskirts and hotpants - because it’s good to get yourself a girl who can do both. If you could make it past the opener without moral outrage, the rest of Back to the Country is rich with thick and polished twang: “I’ve got a yearn for milkin’ cows” she sang on the title track, sounding as if her boots were caked with dirt from a day in the barns. While the album is touted for its progressive standout single, some of Lynn’s early Kentucky roots emerged more than they had on her recent previous records - her ways to bounce a vowel hadn’t always come with a positive embrace, as Nashville got slicker and sharper. Here, Lynn felt like she could reconnect with her roots and deeper self. She and longtime producer Owen Bradley staged the sessions at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, a studio built on the outskirts of Nashville into an actual red barn. Rather than write the tracks herself, Lynn sang cuts from the likes of Tom T. With the exception of “The Pill,” Back to the Country was a fairly commercial package. She was continually reminding her fans that she was, make no mistake, a country girl, even with a shiny tour bus and huge plot of land in Tennessee. Lynn - no matter what the embrace or where it originated - seemed steadfast about keeping her music rooted in sonic traditions, even if her topics or her listeners veered anything but. In 1973, she was the first country artist on the cover of Newsweek, a kind of success that would see no cap once the film Coal Miner’s Daughter, starring Sissy Spacek and adapted from her memoir, was nominated for Academy Awards in 1980. Lynn may not have been close to being one of the “outlaw” musicians of the late ’60s - not decked in leather nor caught smoking weed with Willie Nelson - but you could easily argue she was among the most outlaw of them all.īy the time Back to the Country actually came out in 1975, Lynn was a national star, even beyond the genre. It set a template for artists like Musgraves and The Chicks to follow in her wake: Radio might not embrace you, but there are paths where executing the truth - often, a feminine truth - is more accessible outside of the mainstream modes of success, and sometimes more alluring. Though radio stations across the country banned “The Pill,” that only made it more alluring to fans who helped boost its sales, making it one of her biggest sellers of all time. But they were wrong about the consequences of releasing a song so polarizing. After all, 1972 was the year that the Supreme Court had made the contraceptive legal, so the subject matter was about as hot-button as it comes, and country music was not in the business of hot-button: It peddled nostalgia, not the possibilities of the future.
At first, it was put in Lynn’s back pocket after a recording session when the label deemed it too controversial to release. Its eventual opening track, “The Pill,” was a song about the birth control pill and the freedoms it could give a woman from - but not limited to - a philandering husband.
This particular collection was sandwiched between They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy the year prior and her fifth Conway Twitty collaboration, Feelins’. She was releasing and recording albums, like most other bankable country stars of the day, at a rapid clip. Lynn had started working on her 25th studio LP, Back to the Country, in 1972. But topics that were important to women were important to Loretta Lynn. Lynn was talking about her song, “The Pill,” from her 1975 album Back to the Country, but she could have been referring to any number of singles released by women in country music over the years, from Kacey Musgraves’ queer-friendly “Follow Your Arrow” to The Chicks’ mischievous “Sin Wagon” to Mickey Guyton’s revolutionary “Black Like Me.” Things that were important to women - sex, equality, redemption, unfiltered love, birth control, a little bit of weed on occasion - have never been important enough to country radio to do anything but prevent them from entering at the gate. “Something that’s really important to women,” Loretta Lynn wrote in her 1976 memoir Coal Miner’s Daughter, “ don’t want no part of, leastways not on the air.”
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