Coal Miner's Niece

Last night I got sucked into one of my favorite movies of all time, the incomparable "Coal Miner's Daughter". For any of the three people in the US who haven't seen it, "CMD" tells the life story of Loretta Lynn, at least a good bit of it. It was released in 1980 before some of the more tragic things befell her, like the time her favorite son Jack Benny Lynn drowned, but not before other bad stuff happened, like the time she named her favorite son Jack Benny Lynn. Loretta's played by Sissy Spacek and her parents are Levon Helm and that woman from the Dorothea Lange photograph; Tommy Lee Jones (this was before he was universally acknowledged as a grouchy assface so you're not taken totally out of the movie) is her feckless husband Doolittle, aka Mooney. There are cameos by Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and the pride of Harpeth Hall, Miss Minnie Pearl, and strong supporting roles by a variety of fantastically tall hairdos and the kind of frothy dresses I'd begged my horrified mother to buy for me for years. And of course the music is fantastic - lots of the country classics when the genre was less bewildering Brad Paisley crap and more "you stupid drunk sonofabitch what are you doing with that trashy thang in the back of my Daddy's barn I'm gonna whale the tar outta you". In short, this movie is pretty much perfection from beginning to end.

Were I to nitpick I can only think of two things about it that I'd change. The first is the decision to cast Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline. Her acting was fine but she put way too much vibrato into the singing; "Sweet Dreams" doesn't need to sound like opera. I was so put off by her performance that I didn't warm up to her again until the soul-stirring "they're all wet...Oh God...the dog wet on the picnic basket!" soliloquy in "Vacation" years later. The second is an offense both more personal and egregious, and that is the total failure of the filmmakers to include me in the movie. Lest you think I'm being my usual self and am just trying to horn my way into everything, you should know that featuring me in "CMD" would have been completely appropriate because I actually used to live with Loretta Lynn. To be more specific, she lived in my house. Or maybe my family's house. Fine, my aunt and uncle sold her their house - the homestead formerly known to our family as Hurricane Mills but whose drag name is now the Double L Ranch.

 

what a dump

 

So maybe they actually sold it a few years before I was born and I might not have ever been inside, per se, but shut your stupid talky face-part already, can't you totally see me having an Evita moment on that upstairs balcony? Don't cry for me middle Tennesseeeeeeee, the truth is the Log Cabin restaurant at the Waverly exit off of I-40 has really damn good chicken fried steak and okraaaaa....

 

Despite the fact that the younger generation didn't ever reside there, we have some pretty legendary stories about the place. My grandfather broke his ankle skateboarding across the downstairs porch, for example, which wouldn't be that remarkable except for the fact that he was 53 and high. Another family favorite is the time my mom and cousin Jeannie took a bunch of Polaroids of each other which they doctored by pulling away the photo backing and scraping off parts of the emulsion. Mom, thinking nothing of it, left them upstairs in a desk in the old mill. When Mooney found them years later he made all kinds of a to-do all about the Double L "ghost photos"; in a matter of months Mom and Jeannie were both sort of featured in both a National Enquirer article and hour-long tv special about "Loretta's Haunted Mansion!" If I'm remembering correctly, at air time those ghosts were, respectively, hollering at me for lying about my math homework and making meatloaf.

 

Another reason I love "CMD" is because it was one of the main things that brought my old roommate/best friend John Stamos and me together. Neither of us knew a soul when we arrived at Davidson freshman year, so the first couple of days were spent on nervous small talk with our new dormmates. When John Stamos mentioned that she liked "CMD", I knew I liked her. I told John Stamos our family connection to the movie and told her she should ask my parents about it, but John Stamos was understandably skeptical of their veracity given their behavior on drop-off day. Mom had hilariously introduced herself to everyone as "Elise's surrogate mother...her real parents are at a clogging convention in Nashville", while Dad wandered the campus with his video camera loudly narrating a bunch of bullshit about the place "...that there is the steam facility, and the building to the left is something what with science..." He was vigorous with his misidentification. Anyway, I was pretty excited the first time John Stamos came to Memphis with me; I was going to stop at Hurricane Mills on the drive home and show John Stamos around and prove once and for all that yes, Loretta Lynn was indeed walking where my people had once tread. I figured we'd get a mention in the museum or a write-up in the history of the place or something. Sure enough, there was a plaque right in front of the main house giving the lineage of the property...that completely misidentifed my family. John Stamos to this day remains unimpressed.

 

I've mostly gotten over all of it as the years have passed, but I'm still pretty sure some sort of restitution is in order. If they make a "CMD 2: Electric Boogaloo" it would probably be appropriate if not mandatory to include me somehow. Cslos, my smartass sister, suggested I be played by Shirley Hemphill but she's an idiot because Shirley's dead and also it should totally be Richard Simmons. John Stamos, of course, will be portrayed by John Stamos. In the meantime, re-watch "Coal Miner's Daughter", and say a prayer of thanks for everything I've done for Loretta's career. I'm the wind beneath her wings.