Loretta Lynn, née Webb, was out of her teenage years and out of the woods when she went cleaning doorknobs with her husband Oliver.

The parents of four children at the time - twins were added later - rattled the radio stations of the American South in 1960 and without further ado gave the disc jockeys a single - "I'm A Honky Tonk Girl": That stayed, as a calling card , valid for more than sixty years.

Loretta Lynn became the queen of country music—not as garishly spectacular as Dolly Parton, not as folky-sensibly as Emmylou Harris, nor as vampy-seductive as Jessi Colter;

but a paragon of steadfastness, professionalism and productivity, a monument more enduring than bronze, one might say with Horace.

Edo Reents

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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On the most striking of her probably seventy record releases, her life and career stations can be read and sung literally: from the "Blue Kentucky Girl", who as "Coal Miner's Daughter" did not have an easy childhood, but soon embodied a self-confident femininity that she rivals ("You Ain't Woman Tight"), to the devoted-but-not-submissive spouse, who can also become fisty, and then warns "Don't Come Home A Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind )” to the longest-serving interpreter not only of this genre, who laughs last and therefore best (“They call me hillbilly, but I got the last laugh”) and, not long before entering her tenth decade, was still able to assert herself , she is “Still Woman Enough”.

Lessons in courage and perseverance

But how much woman is enough?

It depends.

Loretta Lynn brought a confident but by no means rowdy feminist tone to country.

That was doubly unheard of after decades of male rule and the corresponding catalog of topics from alcohol, jealousy, lovesickness and homesickness.

Subsequent generations use this achievement to this day, Lucinda Williams, Shania Twain or Kacey Musgraves.

The Wilburn Brothers were the first to take notice of them and brokered them to Decca Records.

Her 1962 debut on the Grand Ole Opry tied her to Nashville.

To make it there was both triumph and peril for any country musician.

Countless people got their guts there, but not Loretta Lynn.

In the middle of her life she was already writing her autobiography "Coal Miner's Daughter", whose spectacular film adaptation by Michael Apted (German "Nashville Lady", 1980) brought the title actress Sissy Spacek an Oscar.

Indirectly, this proved how much something exemplary clung to their existence, which, due to the tough years of apprenticeship, did not necessarily invite imitation, but did provide lessons in courage and perseverance.

As Britain's Queen saw and saw her prime ministers come and go, so she saw and said goodbye to her musical partners - including Ernest Tubb, Conway Twitty, Shel Silverstein, Elvis Costello and young Jack White, who tailored her one of the most remarkable records arguably has ever recorded an entertainment musician of this age;

Finally, one stands in amazement in front of this powerful, qualitatively constant work, which contains practically no outliers, not even shrill tones.

With grace, dignity and a mountain stream-clear, never sweet soprano, Loretta Lynn sang her way onto the throne from which she now, at the age of ninety, has set out into another world.