[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 175 (Monday, November 14, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Page S6661]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                        REMEMBERING LORETTA LYNN

 Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, over the years, country music 
has evolved from its humble roots into a celebration of extremes. Most 
modern artists like to draw their listeners into one of two states: 
perfect happiness or pure agony. But country music's legacy lies 
somewhere in the middle, where life tests our mettle and deals both joy 
and sorrow, all too often in unequal measure. It is the realm of the 
courageously unlucky and the quietly brokenhearted and the source of 
the world's most complex and affecting storytelling. It is that world 
that Loretta Lynn invited us to experience from the time she was a 
young woman until the day she died.
  Her resume is one of the most impressive in all entertainment: 46 
solo studio albums, more than 50 Top Ten hits, member of the Grand Ole 
Opry, Country Music Hall of Famer, and the Country Music Association's 
first female Entertainer of the Year. But Loretta was much more than 
the sum of her accolades.
  She grew up poor and uneducated in the coal-mining hills of Kentucky. 
She was a wife at 15, a mother at 16, and moved thousands of miles away 
from home at an age when most teenagers today would just start dreaming 
about escaping from their parents. When she wasn't busy raising her 
children, she sang and played songs on a $17 Sears guitar.
  If Nashville is a 10-year town, then I suppose Loretta Lynn must have 
considered herself lucky at last, she only had to wait 7 months from 
the time of her first record pressing to the moment she first stepped 
onstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Still, at 28, she had seen more than 
enough to know that there was no hiding in a spotlight, so she sang 
about her life and found a voice that was once assertive and 
disruptive. She blazed trails in music and television by being herself, 
using humor to blunt the edge that hard living and having little agency 
well into womanhood had given her writing.
  On October 4 of this year, we lost our coal miner's daughter to a far 
better place. I will be forever grateful to her for her absolute belief 
in the power of storytelling. I hope her memory will inspire future 
generations of young women in music to do the bravest thing an artist 
can do and share their joy, pain, confusion, and hope in its most 
authentic form.

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