The Lynns Unintimidated By Impending Stardom
‘Come in,” invite The Lynns more or less in unison, ushering a wary victim into a generic room at the Nashville office of Warner Bros. “And don’t be afraid.”
Easy for them to say.
These 32-year-old twins - proud owners of a duet recording contract with Warner Bros. - have been known to country music fans for three decades now via their mother, Loretta Lynn. Her description of them emphasizes their tempestuous and mischievous natures, and she hasn’t exaggerated. The prospect of their impending stardom doesn’t appear to have cowed them a bit.
The ensuing so-called “interview” turns out to be a hillbilly circus in which the pair of interviewees mostly half-grill and half-heckle each other, taking the fast-moving discussion in whatever direction suits their whims. Occasionally, the nominal interviewer manages to squeeze in a question of his own. Such as:
When did these two, who put 60 miles between themselves as soon as they were grown, decide to become a duo?
“In 1990,” replies Peggy, the blonde. “Actually, both of us were singing before then as solos, trying to hone in on a solo career. As twins, you get to a certain age, like in your late teens, and the first thing you want to do is separate. Because everyone in your life regards (the two of) you as one, and you’re not. You have to go find your own identity.”
“You’re totally different inside,” amplifies Patsy, the brunette. “When I look at Peggy, I don’t see anything that looks like Patsy to me, and when she looks at me it’s the same way.”
The two had no thought of singing together in 1990 when they were hired as road-tour backup singers by their mother, who entered the bus one day and ordered them to work up a song together to perform on stage.
The song their matriarch wanted them to sing turned out to be the ethereal Everly Brothers classic, “All I Have to Do Is Dream.” They did what they were told.
“Me and Patsy, we started singing, and the first note out of our mouths, the whole bus filled up with these harmonies,” Peggy says. “And we knew.”
“Hello,” Patsy interjects. “We knew right then that we were a duo.”
But they aren’t what Nashville-resident Peggy calls “star-babies,” progeny of the famous who try to capitalize on the feats and names of their parents. When the Lynn twins got serious about becoming stars themselves, they sneaked down to Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, a venerable and once-glorious beer joint in downtown Nashville, and took an incognito weeknight gig.
They called their band The Honkabillies, a fusion of honkytonk and rockabilly, and their first night at Tootsie’s they drew five people, they recall. But a year and a half later their throngs were sufficient to incense fire marshals, around which time a woman from Warner Bros. dropped by out of curiosity. The next time she came, she brought her boss.
The two record executives were offering the twins a recording contract when they learned of The Lynns’ heritage. The fact that it happened that way is important to the sisters.
“I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, Loretta did it for ‘em,”’ Peggy says. “Because Loretta couldn’t have done it for us. Loretta couldn’t call up Jim Ed Norman (the boss of Warner’s Nashville office) and say, ‘Give my daughters a contract.”’
Don’t, however, take that to mean they aren’t proud of their parents, Loretta and their father, the late O.V. (Mooney) Lynn, the storied ex-moonshine runner and logger who pushed his wife out of the Kentucky mountains and into the music business.
Mooney’s Nashville reputation was mostly as a comically hard-drinking and rural show business husband, but Nashville hardly knew him. The World War II paratrooper wasn’t just a lucky beneficiary of his wife’s success. He was, rather, not only the prime catalyst of that success but also the hard-working boss of their 1,400-acre Middle Tennessee plantation/ “dude ranch.”
There, in little Hurricane Mills, is where Patsy and Peggy grew up under Mooney’s commanding eye. Their mother was mostly on the road doing her part to try to help pay for the place. Her daughters say when they were around her for extended periods, such as the two weeks each summer they traveled the fair circuit with her, it was like visiting a favorite aunt.
“We’d sneak off and do the rides and stuff, but if we got too far from Mom, I’ve seen her stop a show right in the middle of a song and say, ‘Peggy Jean, you git your tail to the bus right now!”’ Peggy remembers.
Generally, though, they were supervised by fiercely non-elitist Mooney, who insisted they attend public schools, go to church on Sundays and Wednesdays, hoe the garden, get up hay, etc. Thus, despite growing up in a show-business family, their country music exhibits much the same sort of real-life grounding that their mother has so long displayed.
Their recently released first CD contains eight tracks they wrote or co-wrote themselves - ranging from “Woman to Woman,” about a confrontation Peggy had with a rival in romance, to “I Won’t Leave this World Unloved,” whose title comes from a deathbed reflection by their father. It’s The Lynns’ own music, but you can hear their mother in it.
Asked how Hurricane Mills, Tenn., relates to country music in the late 1990s, Patsy answers emphatically:
“It is country music. Because who’s listening to country music? Everyday people.”