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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lynn Twins Kept Family Ties To Themselves

Jack Hurst Chicago Tribune

The Lynn twins, Patsy and Peggy - whose “Nights Like These” is now in the Billboard charts - had been playing Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville every other Thursday night for several months when Lisa Bradley of Warner/ Reprise Records happened in.

Bradley was so impressed that she returned for the Lynns’ next Thursday-night show with her boss, Warner/Reprise Vice President of Artists and Repertoire Doug Grau. Grau soon found himself as excited about the siblings as Bradley was.

When the two record people started talking with the Lynns, who had begun their Tootsie’s stint calling themselves the Honk-A-Billies, they got a further jolt.

“I told them our aunt was on this label for many years,” Patsy says. “Doug Grau just kind of looked at us and asked, ‘Who’s your aunt?’ I said, ‘Crystal Gayle. Loretta is our mother. We’re Loretta’s twin daughters.”’

A laughing Peggy remembers that Grau was floored.

“He was like, ‘You’re Loretta Lynn’s daughters?”’

“We didn’t tell anyone who our family was, because it wasn’t an issue,” Peggy says. “It was about our music. I would wear Mama’s old stage boots and dress, but it was my secret. Our mama had shared with me and Patsy the gift of music, but you have to make your own way in life.”

Shania hits chart 5 times

Shania Twain simultaneously had five of the 16 tracks from her new “Come on Over” CD listed among the 75 titles in Billboard’s Hot Country Singles and Tracks chart the week before the album reached the trade magazine’s Top Country Albums list.

According to Billboard country chart pundit Wade Jessen, though, Twain didn’t break the record for most titles by one artist to appear in the singles chart at one time. He says that’s held by Garth Brooks, who had seven the week his “Fresh Horses” album hit the streets in 1995.

O’Connor talks like loser

Six-time Country Music Association Musician of the Year honoree Mark O’Connor, who was succeeded in 1997 by Brent Mason, says it was “about time” for him to lose.

“People were getting mad at me,” he laughs. “Nobody likes a winner.”

To an observation that he, a world-class string virtuoso specializing in the fiddle, helped bring the instrumentalist category a degree of visibility it hadn’t enjoyed for a while, he recalls that after getting national TV attention with Chet Atkins, Johnny Gimble and Jerry Reed in the 1970s, “in the ‘80s it just went away.

“Then in 1991 when I first got it, they put it on TV, on-camera,” he says. “No, you know what? They put the Vocal Event of the Year oncamera, and we (he, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner) got that with ‘Restless,’ so I still got to accept an award in front of the national TV audience.

“Then in ‘92, when I was up for Musician of the Year, the director went ahead and started putting it on the air. That was a big deal.”

O’Connor says he thinks the exciting TV rendition of “Restless” by such hot instrumentalists may have made the CMA show’s director conscious of the fact that the instrumentalist award could be “worth putting on” the screen as well.

Loveless song not a duet

Patty Loveless says everybody seems to think her record of “You Don’t Seem to Miss Me” with George Jones is a duet.

Not so, Loveless adds, comparing it to her own vocal backup work on Vince Gill’s career-changing “When I Call Your Name,” which she says also was widely mistaken for a duet. On both of those records, she says, the guest artists were doing backup jobs for the lead singers.

Her only concern about “You Don’t Seem to Miss Me,” Loveless says, was whether Jones would do it at all. When asked, he graciously complied.

TNN honors platinum artists

The Nashville Network’s “The Life and Times Of” show is adding a “Platinum Series” of segments to honor performers who have become million-sellers within the past five years. The first honoree is John Michael Montgomery. His segment will air Jan. 14.