102. Loretta Lynn — Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind) (1967)

Adulterous!

1. Here is just a fantastic country album, one of my favorites from the genre we’ve encountered on this list. It’s a remarkably feminist album, full of dark material expressing her frustration at the state of womanhood. The title song alone is essentially an upbeat bop warning her man not to come home and rape her; songs like “The Shoe Goes On The Other Foot Tonight” and “I Got Caught” express a fuck-you independence, a defense of her adulterous behavior in the face of her man’s much worse. It’s not the content I expected from a 60s country album, and that’s probably why it stuck with me so well.
2. The music itself is lovely, very much traditional oldie country music, but with some perfect arrangements and performances. Lynn’s voice is insistent, powerful, and rebellious. It might be easy to brush by on a single glance, but with each listen each tune and the flow of the album as a whole really stick with you. Notably Lynn wrote a number of the tracks here, which was evidently atypical of country singers at the time. It shows in the overwhelmingly personal content.
3. I wrote earlier of how The Electric Prunes caused me to get stuck in this list. When I was stuck, I found myself often floating to the next couple of albums in the list to get inspired, and thus wound up spinning this one quite a few times. That experience is largely what helped me focus on the lyricism, while the music had a chance to familiarize itself with my brain. If there’s a silver lining in taking such a long break from this whole experiment, it’s just that. I’m not sure I appreciated this album as much on first listen as I do now.

One Essential Song:

Listen on Spotify: