"Don’t Come Home A Drinkin' (with Lovin' on Your Mind)" by LORETTA LYNN
Loretta Lynn won fans as her songs were banned by radio, singing the truths she knew.
Leave that bottle or me behind
Loretta Lynn was Country. As popular music genres go, Country Music has been the one most consistently in an internal debate as to who or what doesn’t belong. But Lynn is inarguable. Since the 1950s, when songwriter Harlan Howard said “All you need to write a country song is three chords and the truth,” no one has been better at the truth part. She really was born “a coal miner’s daughter, in a cabin, on a hill in Butcher Holler,” KY. Autobiographical or not, her kind of truth got her in trouble and won her fans in almost equal measure. She used to joke that she could tell how well her records would do by how many radio stations had banned them.
“Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” was the first of her 14 songs to earn a radio ban for their subject matter. The most famous of these was “The Pill,” which was shelved by the record label for two years before it was released in 1975, a decade and a half after the introduction of oral contraceptives. “The Pill” was banned by 60 radio stations before its steady sales — more than 15,000 copies a week – forced the hands of programmers afraid of losing her fans to rivals down the dial. By comparison, a song about a fed-up wife refusing sex to husband who’s again come home drunk hardly seems at all controversial, but to Lynn, none of it was. As Harold Bradley told his brother Owen after their first recording session with her, “Whatever’s in that woman’s heart comes out of her mouth.”
Lynn had a small hit with her debut “I’m A Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960, but her career had stalled following the era’s typical path of constant touring and recording other songwriters. Owen Bradley, the author of the smooth, polished Nashville Sound, urged her to return to what brought her to Music City in the first place — her own songs, originally written to entertain her four (and eventually six) children. Bradley told her, “write your next record.”
Her turning point came after a woman had met Lynn backstage and confided that another woman was trying to pry her husband away from her, to which Lynn responded, “Honey, she ain't woman enough to take your man.” She went to her dressing room and sat down what would be her biggest hit to that point, the #2 Country single, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).”
The next song Lynn wrote with what would become her trademark blunt display of backbone took inspiration from something closer to home. Her husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn was an alcoholic. What’s remarkable about “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” is that she doesn’t simply castigate him for his drinking and carousing or even the implied infidelity; rather, she emphasizes what she needs and what she’s not getting.
No, don't come home a drinkin' with lovin' on your mind
Just stay out there on the town and see what you can find
'Cause if you want that kind of love, well, you don't need none of mine
So don't come home a drinkin' with lovin' on your mind
You never take me anywhere because you're always gone
Many a night I've laid awake and cried here all alone
Then you come in a kissin' on me it happens every time
So don't come home a drinkin' with lovin' on your mind
Her lyrics are remarkably economical; she writes a whole act of a play in two verses. Also remarkable is that doesn’t blame the alcohol; she puts the blame on the man. It’s in this way that the song is a spiritual success to idol Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Wells' song was an answer to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” where she sings “It's a shame that all the blame is on us women.” This is also perhaps a reason why the song, despite its similarities to “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” got its own cold shoulder from radio. It’s one thing to direct your ire at the other woman. It’s another to hold a mirror up to men who might be determining whether or not your song gets played.
Owen Bradley’s production for “Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind)” is similarly economical, adding none of the gloss he put on songs by Lynn’s friend and mentor Patsy Cline. Here, he lets nothing get in the way of what’s in Lynn’s heart, surrounding what comes out of her mouth with a simple arrangement of toe-tapping tic tac bass, ace country guitar picking, and razor-sharp pedal steel. Backing vocals by the famed vocal group The Jordanaires are the fanciest thing about it.
The single sold without radio play, and after about three months, the stations relented. The audience had spoken for the woman who spoke for them. The song would be Lynn’s first Country #1 hit and the first Country #1 written and recorded by a woman. The song crossed over to the pop charts, and in 1967, the year the term “Women’s Liberation” was coined, the album Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind) would sell a half million copies and earn her a gold record — another first for a woman in Country music.
In an era where most every Country star wore sequined Nudie suits, fantastic costumes that gave them an otherworldly sparkle, Loretta Lynn seemed knowable. Audiences recognized their friends and neighbors and themselves in her songs. And it wasn’t just women, even if an artist who could authentically speak to women’s lives had been a long time coming. She sang about hard times without being maudlin. She was plainspoken to the point of being blunt. She could sing the hurt but with resolve not to break. She was country.
“You don’t write about fantasies. You write about life and true life,” Lynn says on Ken Burns’ PBS Country Music documentary. “If you’re writing about what’s happening, that’s all a good song is.”
21 Song Playlist
Some Loretta Lynn favorites, including a tribute to Kitty Wells by Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Tammy Wynette.
What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?
You may have noticed that there were fewer of these emails in your inbox in September. I’d like to promise that I’ll return to a discipline of weekly posts, but my job situation has changed significantly (and very much for the better), so it’s going to take me some time to get my feet back under me. If anything, I want to write more. I’m just still in the process of figuring out how while also cooking dinner more than a couple nights a week.
I’m forever grateful that there’s an audience for The Best Song Ever (This Week), and I’ll keep doing this as long as there are people to read it.
Thank You
Thanks to Ed, my father. Loretta Lynn was Dad’s favorite, and I don’t think I ever fully realized why until that penultimate graph.