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Finally, Donald Trump has found a celebrity to back his presidential campaign. “Trump has sold me. What more can I say?” said the 83-year-old Loretta Lynn. If you’re looking for a music legend to endorse, say, your plans to build a giant wall to keep the Mexicans out, the Republican-friendly world of Nashville country is a reasonable first port of call, but Lynn’s trumpeting of The Donald is a shock nonetheless. It’s like your much-loved grandfather announcing that the world went to rot when some damn fool gave women the vote and taught them to drive.
A coal miner’s daughter who revolutionised country music in the late 1960s with hits about birth control (The Pill) and women widowed by Vietnam (Dear Uncle Sam), Lynn went on to have a late-career revival at the behest of Jack White in 2004 with her remarkable album Van Lear Rose.
Yet on Full Circle she reverts to an unquestioning orthodoxy, offering a summary of her life. It begins with Whispering Sea, the B-side to her 1960 debut I’m A Honky Tonk Girl, which waltzes along in breezy, traditional fashion. Elsewhere there are Appalachian folk standards from her childhood like Black Jack David and In the Pines, while a lachrymose moment is provided by Always On My Mind, the sentimental ballad recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley to Pet Shop Boys.
Lynn’s voice is strong, something that you can’t take for granted at 83, and the arrangements have the clean-cut professionalism that’s so redolent of Nashville. There’s also a sense of concluding a life well lived: on Lay Me Down, a beautiful duet with Willie Nelson, Lynn reflects on, and accepts, her mortality. It’s not a far-reaching or questioning album, though, and offers none of the depth of the recordings that Johnny Cash made before his death. Instead there is a type of reassuring conservatism and a triumph of showbusiness over reality. Maybe that Trump endorsement isn’t such a surprise after all. (Legacy)