Loretta Lynn gives all that can be asked of her

Loretta Lynn's voice was as big as her wardrobe at her sold-out Greensboro show. (photo by Ryan Snyder)

“Honey, I know I ain’t perfect, but I do everything I can to make myself look great,” Loretta Lynn responded to an adoring crowd during her performance at the War Memorial Auditorium. The 78-year-old unquestionable Queen of Country Music stood there for the first 15 minutes of her show, decked out in a sparkling flavescent-and-cream-colored princess gown that flowed all the way to the floor. It’s a look that she’s authoritatively owned for most of her nearly 50-year career, and one that has aged just as gracefully as she has.

When Lynn’s various physical ailments started acting up — her 2006 shoulder surgery has left her with prolonged discomfort, and she complained her knees were giving her trouble —she politely withdrew to a chair for the majority of the show. Her voice, nonetheless, seemed unaffected. She sang “Here I Am Again” with a note of demonstrative vulnerability, and immediately assumed an air of imposing self-assurance for “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” all while seated in a chair completely swallowed up in the billows of her gown. There were repeated shouts of adoration from the predominantly female audience. “We love you!,” was the sold-out room’s mantra. “And I love you too,” she’d respond. “Every single one of you.” Her preternatural connection with her female audience isn’t exactly hard to explain. She cemented her legacy as a feminist icon when she released

“The Pill” in 1975 after years after already writing from a distinctly self-liberated point of view, and not one iota of the respect that song earned her has faded, as its final line was met with an outburst of high-pitched whooping and applause. Relating to Lynn, however is easy regardless of persuasion. She’s an undeniably motherly figure when she sits there with mic in hand, regaling the audience with stories from her past and engaging in a jokey repartee with her son Ernest Ray and bandleader Bart Hansen. Her show is like an autobiographical narration of her personal life and career. She taked about her friend Garth Brooks, calling him the greatest entertainer alive, and mentioned how much she was looking forward to his return to performing. Among others, she told stories of the death of her close friend Conway Twitty, who was on his way to visit her husband Doo in the hospital when he himself collapsed and died from an aneurysm.

Other times, she was shattering the mood through corny jokes with Ernest Ray, “Hee Haw” style. She joked on Ernest’s decades of hard living and passed the spotlight to him for a slightly off-color joke every now and then. She gets a lot of flak for how much she features her children, and while Patsy and Peggy’s opening mini-set was as vanilla as could be, Ernest does have a distinct charm about him. He crooned Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was” like an inebriate at an open-mic night, and his haggard voice and deportment are the perfect comic foil to Lynn’s matronly stature.

Lynn did show her age somewhat during the show’s last act. There are built-in reprieves for her to catch her voice and recover from the constant effort she gives elsewhere. She invited Hansen to sing one, which he offered up Blake Shelton’s “Nobody But Me,” with a near-perfect country baritone: rich and gentle on the bottom end, though slightly pitchy up top. Hansen and her band spelled her once again with a somewhat thin harmonizing of “Man of Constant Sorrow” that segued into a gospel medley of songs from Lynn’s 1965 release Hymns. She was back on her feet and joining in when it came to “Where No One Stands Alone.”

At its conclusion, she thanked the audience as the band broke into the intro to “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which sent the audience to its feet in applause. Normally the encore, Lynn’s condition prevented the processionary that normally accompanies it, so she simple faced the audience, bowed slightly and issued what would have been a curtsy if her knees allowed. It was an acknowledgment of both her appreciation for her adoring listeners and of her imperfections, but like she said, she’s doing the best she can.