PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)
By:
July 20, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Country Music of the Fifties (1954–1963)! Series edited by Josh Glenn. Qobuz playlist here.
LORETTA LYNN | I’M A HONKY-TONK GIRL | 1960
In my late teens / early twenties, I made friends with a bunch of Mass Art students who were full of unembarrassed, comic ambition. We loved to entertain one another and often disguised the beauty of youth in work clothes from Harry the Greek’s and oversized winter coats. Our mixtapes had songs by Ace Frehley, the Dead Boys, Frankie Laine, the Fall, Donna Summer, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Red Sovine, George and Tammy and Merle and Wanda. We loved country music. Loretta Lynn was my favorite. Her songs were so simple, her voice unfeigned and plangent. Amid the chaotic signifying of that time, her innocence and frankness called out to something innocent and frank inside me.
In December 1987, eight of us drove down to Nashville, picked up two more of us at the airport, and crammed into a motel room, where we improvised a drunken nativity play on Christmas Eve. The next day, hungover, we saw Hank Snow and Bill Monroe and Minnie Pearl and Grandpa Jones at the Opry, and Twitty City in the snow. We went to Ernest Tubbs’s record shop and spotted Steve Earle at Denny’s. I bought a pair of short white cowboy boots, Neil, Sam, and Bill found a pedal steel guitar in the pennysaver, and Luther got on stage at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and sang a Hank Williams song. Then we headed off to Memphis, stopping on the way at Loretta Lynn’s Ranch and Museum in Hurricane Mills.
Lynn was several years older than I was at the time of that road trip when she wrote “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” and made her first record with it. She had a husband and four children. In my stupidity, I read that not as experience but as its absence and thought the song was charming because Lynn was so patently not a Honky Tonk girl. I thought of her as a Mary Ann to Tammy Wynette’s Ginger — which was true — but also, though they were stars contemporaneously, Lynn was a relatively late bloomer, and there were ten years between them. Lynn was transitional, a bridge from the late fifties to the mid-sixties. Their different sound (parlor instruments vs. countrypolitan plushness) was also a reflection of evolving Nashville styles.
I was so sure “Honky Tonk Girl” was a tribute to Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” that I invented a scene in Coal Miner’s Daughter (inarguably the best biopic ever, for what that’s worth) in which Sissy Spacek receives a lightning bolt of inspiration while listening to Wells’s song on the radio, picks up her twelve-dollar guitar, and writes her own song on the spot. When I went through Lynn’s autobiography looking for confirmation, all I found was: “It was mostly about a girl I used to see in Bill’s Tavern, drinking beer and crying. I don’t think she recognized that song was about her.” There’s the real difference: Wynette was the girl in the bar; Lynn was the girl’s curious, kind, nonjudgmental friend.
PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn. Nadine Hubbs on Marty Robbins’ EL PASO | Elizabeth Nelson on Dave Dudley’s SIX DAYS ON THE ROAD | Lynn Peril on Jean Chapel’s WELCOME TO THE CLUB | David Cantwell on Porter Wagoner’s MY BONFIRE | Will Hermes on Johnny Cash’s RING OF FIRE | Mimi Lipson on Loretta Lynn’s I’M A HONKY TONK GIRL | Charles Hughes on Roger Miller’s YOU DON’T WANT MY LOVE | Eric Weisbard on Lefty Frizzell’s THE LONG BLACK VEIL | Steacy Easton on Jean Shepard’s A SATISIFIED MIND | Josh Glenn on Johnny Cash’s THE REBEL — JOHNNY YUMA | Carlo Rotella on Buck Owens’ CLOSE UP THE HONKY TONKS | Annie Nocenti on Patsy Cline’s THREE CIGARETTES IN AN ASHTRAY | Douglas Wolk on Lucky Starr’s I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE | Will Groff on Ray Price’s NIGHT LIFE | Jonny Auping on Willie Nelson’s CRAZY | Brian Berger on Ernest Tubb’s THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS | Jason Grote on Bill Browning and His Echo Valley Boys’ DARK HOLLOW | Peter Doyle on Willie Nelson’s FUNNY HOW TIME SLIPS AWAY | Sam Glenn on Johnny Cash’s BIG RIVER | Annie Zaleski on Patsy Cline’s WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT | Adam McGovern on Elvis Presley’s BLACK STAR / FLAMING STAR | Chris Spurgeon on Ricky Nelson’s BELIEVE WHAT YOU SAY | Stephen Thomas Erlewine on George Jones’ WHITE LIGHTNING | Devin McKinney on George Hamilton IV’s ABILENE | Mark Richardson on Elvis Presley’s BLUE MOON.
ALSO SEE: DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25 of our favorite Country records from 1964–1973) | & more Country at HILOBROW, including short appreciations of Gene Pitney, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Buck Owens, George Jones, June Carter Cash, Charley Pride, and many others.
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