THE LINER NOTES

 

Recorded in May of 1980, ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ was the twenty-sixth long-playing release of Lynn Anderson’s career, and her nineteenth and last album for Columbia Records.

 

Produced once again by guitarist and arranger, Steve Gibson, the ‘Cowgirls’ sessions brought Lynn back to Nashville and the creative community she was closest to. But while this final offering had every opportunity to bring the CBS curtain down with a flourish and fanfare, it’s clear that Lynn’s heart was elsewhere. Marking a new marriage, a new plan, and a new life, ‘Cowgirls’ was not merely her final LP for Columbia…it was going to be her last recording for more than three years. Peaking at number 37 on Billboard’s Country LP’s chart, the album’s production was a throwback to Lynn’s earlier Countrypolitan sound; a sound Gibson also valiantly tried to reproduce on 1978’s ‘From The Inside’. But it was the middle of 1980 now, and while the style’s architect, Lynn’s storied first husband Glenn Sutton, had blown the doors off the music industry with it years earlier, Countrypolitan was on a bus, and the bus was leaving town. It was Country Pop, now, friends and neighbors… ask Wikipedia.

 

A ten-song set from a diverse group of Nashville and LA writers, many of the collection’s brightest moments are unexpected; a cinematic reimagining of Randy Newman’s "Louisiana 1927", and a stone-cold country-rock cover of Exile’s "You Thrill Me"; layered with some of Gibson’s preeminent instrumentation, coursing like a river under one of Lynn’s best performances on the record.

 

But it’s the album’s lead single and title track that drive the heart and the soul of this twenty-sixth release. A cut from songwriter laureate Rodney Crowell that Lynn must’ve thought had mistakenly been pitched to Emmylou Harris. A song that tells us as much about Lynn Anderson’s life and career as any biography ever written about her. An ode to the life that molded her; the life closest to her heart.  An admission, and a confession…that ‘she's a rounder she can tell you that. She can sing 'em all night, too -- She'll raise hell about the sleep she lost…’

…Even cowgirls get the blues.

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J Buck Ford