Patty Loveless
By Chris Varias
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Patty Loveless is one of the few radio stars who doesn’t deserve to be dismissed. Not only does she have a delivery as emotive as any crooner working today, she knows what to do with it. Teaming up with her husband, the revered producer and Nashville player Emory Gordy Jr., who has contributed to such landmark albums as Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel and Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, the pair form a song-crafting machine, plucking better-than-average material from songwriters and sending it up the charts. Loveless’s hits, which she reeled off one-by-one at the Country Music Festival, are glimmers of light in a dull radio format. But while Loveless shouldn’t be dismissed for her radio-star status, she should be scolded for not using it to expand the possibilities of country radio.
But Loveless’s afternoon set was a hit parade of concessions to radio programmers. The most glaring example was the Jim Lauderdale-penned “Halfway Down,” a song about a woman’s downward spiral. Loveless overpowered the silly narrative, bending and stretching her way from rhyme to rhyme. If listeners didn’t pay attention to what she sang, they might have mistaken the tune for an edgy rocker about a girl who doesn’t give a toss. But careful listening revealed lines like “Fighting with the devil / Harder all the time,” which signals a rejection of sin instead of a fascination with the very things that make up a large chunk of the country canon. While the song is dressed up to resemble the tale of a life in decline, it reads more like a memo on the desk of Robert Reed’s corner office at the Christian Coalition, stuff country radio can’t get enough of these days. Sadder, and more revealing, was her rendition of “A Thousand Times a Day.” The song, which compares quitting the hooch to quitting an old flame, was a perfect fit for the newly sober George Jones when he included it on his 1993 album High Tech Redneck. Jones’s version had no luck on the charts back then, but Loveless is doing real well with it today. Yet she should have taken a pass on a song she can’t outdo Jones on, and instead opted for material that would help build a singular and stronger legacy–as Jones, Parton, and Lynn have all done.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of Patty Loveless and photo of Joe Ely by Dan Silverman.
