False Pretenses Lure Lynn To Awards Show

There have been few more moving or more deserving tributes in country music’s gracing of live television in the past few years than the recent presentation on NBC-TV of the Academy of Country Music’s Pioneer Award to Loretta Lynn, who looked dumbfounded - and was.

To attend the Los Angeles ACM show, she had to be torn away from the Nashville hospital bedside of her husband, Mooney, who had suffered complications of bouts with heart surgery and diabetes. As she said in her acceptance speech, she only came to the show because Mooney insisted.

But nobody, not even Mooney, told her that she was going there to receive an award.

“We told her she was going to present an award with Buck Owens,” says publicist Kate Haggerty of Myers Media in Nashville.

Haggerty adds that as the camera zoomed in on Lynn seated with Owens in the audience, the famed Kentucky native was trying to remember the lines she thought she was going to have to deliver in her presentation.

When she reached the stage to receive her award from talk-show hostess Leeza Gibbons, Lynn told the crowd it was “a surprise” to her and that “my husband kept telling me I had to come tonight.” She went on to note that he was in the hospital at that moment and that she wished to thank him “for me being in the (music) business.”

O.V. (Mooney) Lynn, so memorably played by Tommy Lee Jones in his wife’s 1980 film biography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” literally pushed his shy bride onto her first stages circa 1960 and went on to wisely invest her career’s large earnings in land holdings that now amount to an empire.

Despite her periodic frustrations with him - that resulted in such classic songs as “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” as well as some tabloid headlines - Lynn has been fanatically devoted to her mate.

During his illnesses of the past few years, she often refused to leave his hospital bedside even to sleep, napping instead in a chair for weeks and months on end.

It was with his goading that she climbed out of deep Kentucky poverty to become not just one of country music’s most memorable performers but one of the most inspiring and fascinating women in the world - and, at his insistence, she is ending a two-year touring hiatus to perform a limited string of one-nighters this year from Massachusetts to Arizona and Alberta, Canada, to Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Mooney was released from his latest hospitalization the day after the ACM presentation.

Hayes lauds Haggard

Young Oklahoma native Wade Hayes, whose “I’m Still Dancing With You” is currently in the upper reaches of the hit charts, says his foremost influence is Okie-rooted Merle Haggard.

“I don’t think anybody has ever written and sung like he has,” Hayes says of Haggard. “The first time I saw him was on TV, but from the time I was 9 years old I saw him in concert every time he came through Oklahoma.

“I don’t remember the first time I actually saw him (on TV), though. He was making music before I was born. In fact, the year I was born, his album with ‘Okie From Muskogee’ on it came out: 1969.”

Asked if he feels his own music is in the Haggard tradition, Hayes says he hopes so.

“That’s what I try to do,” he says. “The old style of music is what I want to make. I’d be lying to you, though, if I told you I thought it was as good as Haggard’s. Nothing will ever be that good.”

‘Marty Parties’ stomping

Marty Stuart’s “Marty Parties” on The Nashville Network are turning out to be roof-raisers.

After having Travis Tritt and the Kentucky HeadHunters on his recent “Marty Party II,” Stuart has hosted a couple of similarly rebellious acts, The Mavericks and Steve Earle, for “Marty Party III,” scheduled for broadcast Aug. 18.

Rex Allen reborn

The cable network not only has rescued Rex Allen Jr. from oblivion, it now is getting his records released again.

Allen, who had four Top 10 country singles between 1973 and 1985, was pondering quitting the music business in 1991 when the Statler Brothers offered him a spot on “The Statler Brothers Show.” When that Saturday night production became the highest-rated series in TNN history, TNN spun off its “Yesteryear” segment - in which Allen was prominently featured - into a 1994 one-hour series co-hosted by Allen and Lisa Stewart.

The result is the second-mostpopular TNN series, claiming an audience of 28 million.