Consumer Guide Album

Loretta Lynn: I Remember Patsy [MCA, 1977]
I had hopes this might take its place beside one of my favorite country albums, Lefty Frizzell Sings the Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, but Patsy Cline's legacy is a lot narrower than Jimmie's, and Loretta's not quite the singer Frizzell was, either. At forty-one, her voice is thicker than Patsy's was when she died at thirty, and she's a lot more country, especially in her pronunciation--that slight lisp, and the way she distorts the vowels around "r" sounds. On the other hand, she has decent material to work with for once, and her "Why Can't He Be You" is a breathtaking object lesson in the connections between suffering and exaltation. Annoyance: the seven-minute spoken reminiscence that closes the album. B+