The heart leaps at the chance to shift attention from epidemics, recession and state-sponsored snitching back to more intimate and familiar dissolutions, including serial adultery, virtuoso drunkenness and unscheduled tooth removal via sucker punch. Country-music legend Loretta Lynn’s Me and Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust is rich in those traditional themes. It’s also a quick and illuminating read ... Ms. Lynn, now 88, offers a heartfelt and often rollicking remembrance of her friendship with the late Patsy Cline, perhaps the greatest country singer ever... Ms. Lynn tells her story without literary flourish, sometimes including grammatical improvisations that will make pedantic blood boil. I’ve wrote a lot of songs,” she reports early on. Still, daughter and singer-songwriter Patsy Lynn Russell has knocked the book into a breezy memoir. What it lacks in pretension it makes up for in brevity. Several chapters are only a few pages, but like a tight country lyric their success doesn’t depend on syllabic excess ... A diva’s work is never done. Women make up only 16% of country artists and 12% of country songwriters, Ms. Lynn reports, 'which 'just ain’t right.' Besides encouraging young artists, she offers a short list of essential Cline songs to keep her friend’s music alive.
Loretta gives readers an interesting window into what it was like to be a woman in the country music world during the '50s and '60s. She also offers an intriguing glimpse into her personal life, as she talks about growing up poor, marrying when she was a teenager, and living with a husband who cheated on her. She writes with a true down-home country style that shows no pretense, making it feel like she is sitting in your living room sharing her stories with you ... If you’re a country music fan, do yourself a favor and read You’ll be glad you did.
With an outstanding Foreword by Dolly Parton, Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust delivers enjoyable short chapters jumping in and out of stories from Loretta Lynn’s heart, written in Loretta’s own, unedited, authentic, rural mountain voice. Patsy Cline helped Lynn get started in Nashville’s music scene. She even groomed Lynn, teaching the then-country bumpkin how to dress for the stage. A lovely, quick read for classic country music fans.
Lynn is, above all, a great storyteller, and this book is filled with warm and funny stories, as heartfelt and true as any of her songs. But underneath the folksy veneer is an unvarnished view of what it took for her and Cline to make it to the top. “I love seeing women be good friends to each other,” she says.
Lynn has sold more than 45 million albums worldwide and has earned countless accolades. But as she reveals in this warm memoir, if she hadn’t had the support and friendship of Cline, who died tragically in a plane crash in 1963, her rise to stardom might have been a lot harder to achieve ... Written in her hearty, straightforward, authentic voice—Lynn is a storyteller and country singer, not necessarily a prose stylist—the author shares an inspiring story of working in Nashville and on stages across the country that’s interwoven with moments spent with Cline where each encouraged the other to keep moving forward toward yet another successful album and achievement. Lynn reveals her sincere, heartfelt emotions throughout the narrative, giving readers a true sense of the depths of their friendship as well as the haunting pain of Cline’s death ... A touching memoir filled with the emotional highs and lows of a deep bond.
