Taylor Swift has paid tribute to the late Loretta Lynn for “paving the way” for “honest” songwriters.
Beloved songwriter Lynn died earlier this month (October 4) at the age of 90. Over the years she recorded 60 albums, with her most recent being last year’s ‘Still Woman Enough’, and topped the US country charts 16 times. She also sold more than 45million records worldwide.
Jack White and Dolly Parton lead the many tributes to Lynn, with Parton saying the pair were “like sisters all the years we’ve been in Nashville”.
Last night (October 30), Country Music Television aired a new tribute special, Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Celebration Of The Life & Music Of Loretta Lynn, which saw country stars paying tribute to the singer through words and performances.
In an unannounced tribute during the show, Swift said (via Hollywood Life): “I’m so grateful to Loretta for being an example, not only for songwriters everywhere, but more specifically female songwriters.
“She was so ahead of her time. The way she exercised brutal, truthful, fearless honesty every time she sat down to write a song is something that changed music forever and paved the way for every songwriter who’s trying to be truthful and honest today.”
After news of Lynn’s death, tributes poured in from across the musical world and beyond including from Jack White, who produced Lynn’s 2004 album ‘Van Lear Rose’, which went on to become her best-performing album in the US charts at the time, before she topped it with her highest-charting album ever, 2016’s ‘Full Circle’.
“I said when I was first asked about her what I thought, and I said years ago that I thought she was the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century. I still believe that,” White said in a video he posted to Instagram shortly after news of Lynn’s passing emerged.
“She was such an incredible presence and such a brilliant genius in ways that I think only people who got to work with her might know about,” White continued. “What she did for feminism, women’s rights, in a time period and a genre of music that was the hardest to do it in is just outstanding, and will live on for a long time.”
Kelly Clarkson also enlisted Dwayne Johnson for a duet on The Kelly Clarkson Show, with the pair singing ‘Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)’, Lynn’s 1967 single that was also the first of hers to top the Billboard country chart.
Swift, meanwhile, is breaking records with new album ‘Midnights’. Released on October 21, the record arrived with the biggest week for any album in almost seven years, selling 1.578million copies according to Luminate (via Billboard). The last album to achieve such a high number of sales in its first week of release was Adele‘s ’25’ in 2015, which broke the scale with more than 3million units.
It has gone on to earn the singer her 11th Number One album on the US Billboard 200 chart and become the UK’s biggest-selling album of 2022 after just one week.