102. Loretta Lynn - Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind) (February 1967)

1. Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)*

2. I Really Don't Want to Know

3. Tomorrow Never Comes

4. There Goes My Everything

5. The Shoe Goes on the Other Foot Tonight

6. Saint to a Sinner*

7. The Devil Gets His Dues

8. I Can't Keep Away from You

9. I'm Living in Two Worlds*

10. Get Watcha Got and Go

11. Making Plans

12. I Got Caught

A-

Well the country album selections just keep going from strength to strength. This is a short album of short songs (none even reach the three minute mark) but it packs a lot of punch. The sound is lean but rich, a complex intertwining of elaborate lead guitar work and pedal steel, with occasional piano flourishes. The drums more often than not stick to a country clip-clop, but they serve the material. And Loretta Lynn has one of the all time great voices, capable of giving someone a dressing down, carrying a fun little rocker, or evoking a great deal of tenderness, and even sadness.

The songs are mostly covers, but there are a couple of Lynn co-writes. The attention getter is the brilliant title track, which the Book insists is about marital rape. I think that's a valid interpretation, although there's a bit more going on and it's more generally just about the travails of being married to a drunk. Still, it's an upbeat number musically with some pretty dark lyrics, and pretty edgy stuff for the times. 

Most of the other songs are typical country fare about losing in life and love, but they're all from a woman's perspective - which makes them pretty interesting. The stand-outs, for me, are "Saint to a Sinner" and "I'm Living in Two Worlds". The first is about a fallen woman, whose lover has abandoned her out of disgust, and who's trying to explain that he led her down this dark path, and doesn't he understand how hard it was for her to fall. The second is a beautiful song about someone who's fallen for someone who, for lack of a better word, belongs to a different scene. Try as she might, the narrator can't fit in, but she doesn't want to abandon her lover and go back to the loneliness of her prior existence. These are some pretty complex songs and it shows how clever Lynn was in choosing her material. 

Other highlights are "The Shoe Goes on the Other Foot Tonight", about a woman who's sick of her partner's rowdy ways and is going to go out and raise some hell her self for a change, and "I Got Caught", about a woman who got caught cheating but makes the point that the only difference between her and her partner is that she got caught.

Really this is a great album. We haven't had nearly enough female vocalists, which annoys me as I generally prefer them. And the material here is just excellently chosen. Every time I see a country album coming up I get worried, and every time I'm pleasantly surprised.