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Why Loretta Lynn Recorded Shel Silverstein’s “One’s On The Way” In 1971: “I Thought Everybody Had A Baby”
The honest to goodness truth.
The late, great Loretta Lynn was a Country Music Hall of Famer, Grammy winner, and winner of just about every music award imaginable. She released dozens of hit songs, and some of the most important albums in country music history, however, perhaps her largest impact on the country music world was from her willingness to push the boundaries of songwriting and storytelling in country music.
Loretta made an entire career out of saying what no one else would in terms of what it’s really like to be a woman and the real life issues that come with it. She had plenty of songs banned from mainstream country radio back in the day because of that, including some of her most recognizable songs, like “The Pill” and “Rated X”.
She famously said:
“To make it in this business, you either have to be first, great or different, and I was the first to ever go into Nashville, singin’ it like the women lived it.”
And she was one of the very few who did that, and could back it up…
Long before Loretta was even starting to think about pursuing a music career, she was a wife and a mom, working her fingers to the bone every day cleaning her house, doing laundry and cooking, but not in the way we think of it today:
“Before I was singing, I cleaned house; I took in laundry; I picked berries. I worked seven days a week. I was a housewife and mother for 15 years before I was an entertainer. And it wasn’t like being a housewife today.
It was doing hand laundry on a board and cooking on an old coal stove. I grew a garden and canned what I grew. That’s what’s real. I know how to survive.”
A quality that would serve her well over the years, even after she left that life behind in her home in Kentucky.
These experiences shaped her into a salt of the earth, real women who not only knew that people want to hear real, honest songs that speak to their lives and experiences, but from someone who had also lived them herself. Clearly, it was something Loretta understood better than just about anybody, and thankfully, she was never afraid to express that regardless of what any manager, radio station, or label had to say to the contrary.
And a shining example of that is her song “One’s on the Way,” which was released on this date 1971 as the title track to her album, and it ultimately became one of her biggest hits. It became a #1 single on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, but you might be surprised to learn that it was written by famous poet Shel Silverstein.
He also penned Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue,” which won a Grammy for Best Country Song.
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Of course, the subject matter of “One’s on the Way” is incredibly real, which finds Loretta singing about life for a woman in Topeka, Kansas who has several kids already and is pregnant with her next child. While women like Jackie Kennedy and Raquel Welch are living the high life, free to do whatever the please, that type of liberation hadn’t quite reached Topeka:
“The girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib
And better homes and garden shows the modern way to live
And the pill may change the world tomorrow, but meanwhile, today
Here in Topeka, the flies are a buzzin’
The dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin’
One needs a spankin’ and one needs a huggin’
Lord, one’s on the way”
In many ways, the lyrics still ring true today, though obviously the world has changed a lot since this song was released too. It never ceases to amaze me just how timeless Loretta’s music is with every passing year, and it’s of course what made her such a genius and an icon.
Silverstein’s nephew, Mitch Myers, says the song is just a story about the reality of so many women:
“He was a storyteller. He was depicting this woman who was kind of in the middle of her life, and that was being a mother and a housewife and not much else. And that contrasted with ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,’ which Shel wrote, and was used in two different movies, most notably Thelma And Louise, and most notably performed by Marianne Faithfull.
There’s a woman who was in her middle class home and everything is fine in terms of comfort and aesthetics, and she goes crazy.”
Loretta herself was a housewife with six children long before she ever even dreamt of becoming a country music star, living a very simple life without much money or anything like that, and she previously revealed that she had been pregnant nine times in total, sadly suffering three miscarriages throughout her life.
She joked that with “One’s on the Way,” she thought “everybody had a baby”:
“With ‘One’s On The Way,’ I thought everybody had a baby. I sure did. I didn’t think anybody else was too good to.”
There’s so much truth in everything she did and said, and Loretta never pretended to be anything she wasn’t. She lived such an incredible life, defeated all odds and became an icon because she was willing to be honest about everything she ever went through.
She never shied away from it, or tried to make anything out to be something that it wasn’t… the earnestness that radiated through her was something special, to be sure.
There will never, ever be another one like her.
Turn it up:
“One’s On The Way”
The post Why Loretta Lynn Recorded Shel Silverstein’s “One’s On The Way” In 1971: “I Thought Everybody Had A Baby” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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