Jack White on his favourite country songs of all time: “Important for the rest of pop culture”
Jack White has never been that far away from country music. While most of The White Stripes’ catalogue fits pretty snuggly in the world of garage rock, his acoustic chops, when it came time to break out the sensitive side of himself, were always indebted to the world of country. White was deeply inspired by the genre and admitted that Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn wrote two of the greatest country songs of all time.
Then again, any aspiring songwriter could learn a thing or two from dissecting Williams’s body of work. A lot of the tunes might seem simplistic if you just tried to play them on an acoustic guitar, but being able to tell those standalone stories with a satisfying ending all the way through is something that only Williams could pull off.
While Williams has been revered by other alternative artists like Beck, White said that ‘Cold Cold Heart’ was one of his favourites. That was always straight-ahead country music, but Lynn always offered something different whenever she sang.
Whereas many great female country singers could play it safe with the kind of topics that they covered, Lynn didn’t bother sounding nice whenever she got behind the microphone. There are definitely tender-hearted songs across her albums, but no one was daring enough to write a song like ‘Fist City’, which comes with a warning to any woman who tries to get in between her and her man.
Out of all of Lynn’s message songs, though, White had an affinity for ‘Don’t Come Home Drinking With Loving On Your Mind’. Country music is never going to run short on songs about love, but Lynn was never afraid to put her man in his place if he started to get out of line whenever he had a couple of drinks.
White had gotten acquainted with many other classics before hearing Lynn, but this was a major turning point for his taste, saying, “That went in so many different directions. It was the female side of our species speaking finally for themselves out loud and it got by the censors and became a hit. That song was very important for the rest of pop culture and culture for the whole world too”.
Despite Lynn’s approach as a commanding presence in the country world, White always took a different approach when writing his downtempo songs. Across The Stripes’ catalogue, songs like ‘You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket’ or ‘A Martyr For My Love For You’ see him at his most vulnerable, as if he’s trying and failing to be the commanding reflection of Lynn.
Although meeting one’s heroes is always tricky, White managed to become friendly with Lynn as the years went on, going on to make a collaborative album with her and fitting in like a glove when writing songs like ‘Portland, Oregon’. The focus was still on the rock and roll guitars, but the road towards heartbreaking country songs was never that far away for White.
