Part 2
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I Carry My Accent. I Carry My Memories.
Here's the line that stopped me cold: "I don't need to carry anything to remind me. I carry my accent. I carry my memories. I carry just that old country girl." Then, almost in the same breath, something that sounds like a confession and a correction at once: "I look artificial, but I'd like to think I'm a real home-loving person, family-loving person."
Read that the way you'd read a sentence in a novel and it hands you the whole book. The costume is the joke she's in on. The accent, the memories, the cooking, the family — that's the spine. She grew up with a bunch of strong Southern women who kept the families going. When she's cooking, she says, she thinks of herself as just an old country woman, and she sees her aunts and her grandmothers and her mother in the things she does. "And I love that," she says. "I just embrace that."
Which brings us to the best thing she says in the whole conversation. Never be ashamed of your family, or your religion, or how you were brought up. "Incorporate all those things into weaving a wonderful basket that you can carry the world in if you have to." That is not a country-music quote. That's a craft quote. Every artist is a basket case in the literal sense — you weave whatever you were handed into something strong enough to haul your whole life around in.
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The Work: Linda, Emmylou, and a Love Album
Then she gets down to business, and the business is music. She calls the work she did with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris one of the things she's proudest of. Two big hit records came out of it, and eventually they went back to the vaults: remastered, reworked, and paired with roughly twenty songs that had been sitting in the can. "So that's everything we've ever done," she says. "There's nothing else left." The Complete Trio Collection is the sound of three voices that were never supposed to fit, fitting anyway.
And then Pure & Simple, which she wrote, arranged, and produced herself, with help from her guys — Richard Dennison, Tom Rutledge, and Kent Wells. Every song on it is hers. The reason is the anniversary: fifty years married, so a love album. "It's been a long time since I've had a number one album in the charts," she says. "So, it always feels good to be number one, especially at this age, to still be in the game."
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I Pray and Pee and Go to Work
Somebody asked her what her ritual is, and the answer is the most useful sentence about creative practice I've ever heard from a famous person: "Well, I pray and pee and go to work." No mountain. No muse. No scented candle. A prayer, a pit stop, and the job.
And what she prays for matters just as much. She asks to touch people. To say something that uplifts people. To be a bright spot. To glorify God — and, in the same list, to have a good time herself. That order is not an accident. Service first, joy included, and no apology for either one.
Which brings us back to where we started, and to the very first thing she says: "I've done something good. I've done plenty bad, I'm sure. But I just hope that I'll be remembered well."
The Girl in the Doorway, Fifty Years Later
So go back to that doorway. The girl is small, the woman is a parade, the adults are cruel, and the word on the table is trash. That girl grows up to become one of the most recognizable women in country music — the yellow hair, the red lips, the painted eyes, the tight and flashy everything. And she does it not by running from the word but by retiring it. She takes everything they said about that woman and builds a life so big that "trash" just sounds like a bad review from people who never understood the costume in the first place.
She says she hopes she'll be remembered well. Stand in the doorway one more time and watch the two of them: the woman with the hair, walking out of frame, and the girl watching her, who grew up to be the kind of person who carries the world in a basket she wove herself. That's not a punchline. That's the whole movie — the kind where the kid gets the last word, and the last word is her own name.
Next time: what happens when a woman who prays, pees, and goes to work decides there's nothing left in the can — and what a "complete collection" really means when the artist is still writing new chapters. Keep the porch light on. She isn't finished.
