1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 79. Loretta Lynn – Don't Come Home a Drinkin’ (1967)

Here we go with some full-on country and western, with the Bakersfield steel guitars giving a bit of slide and honky-tonk, but this time the songs are told from a female perspective. And so there are the hard-drinking men, the philandering men, the violent men. But whereas the male country singers either lionise these types, or if they sing of regret it’s usually with a good dose of fatalism, Lynn reveals the effect that such behaviour has on the women in the songs, the ones who have to fend off the unwanted advances of a drunken amorous husband, for example, in the title song, which is somewhat autobiographical. 

And if you think about those murder ballads, where the man kills a rival for his sweetheart’s affections, from her perspective she’s got one man dead, the other in prison and likely on death row – great job ruining my life, Mr Hero. Lynn does get in a bit of sauce for the goose though, with a cheating wife’s righteous indignation that I Got Caught (but honey you’re a pro). Somewhat autobiographical.  

Lynn was a coal miner’s daughter (and if that sounds familiar it’s because the Sissy Spasek film of the same name was her biopic) from Kentucky; you can’t get more Country than that, and this album does what you’d expect in terms of the music, even if the viewpoint is different.