Loretta Lynn is perhaps the only living country artist who will stop an interview deader than roadkill to inquire: "So how are you doin'?"
When it's gently pointed out that the state of the interviewer's well-being really isn't the purpose of the call, the 73-year-old legend laughs and says: "Sorry, darlin', you know, that's just how I am."
Over a nearly 50-year career, that down-home perspective has been, perhaps, the key to the Hurricane Mills, Tenn., resident's universal appeal.
Still, it can occasionally pose problems.
"Yesterday, some woman just come on up to the house!" Lynn recalls. "She walked herself up from the road. She knocked on the door and said, 'I'm here to see Loretta. I'm one of her fans.' "
An assistant explained that the singer was resting.
"There's never been any difference between me and the folks who listen to my music," Lynn says.
Because of that bond, the country legend anticipates that her audience will sing along to her hits "You're Lookin' at Country" and "Blue Kentucky Girl" when she debuts at the Cobb Energy Centre Saturday night.
While the singer is excited to perform at the new facility, she laments the loss of Lanierland, the family-run, outdoors country venue on Jot-Em Down Road in Cumming where she performed for decades. The business shuttered in 2006.
"I hate it that they closed down," Lynn says. "They fed me and the band but good over the years. I can still taste that cobbler, too."
During those performances, women, in particular, loved to sing along to her 1968 hit, "Fist City." Sample lyrics: "Ya better detour around my town/Cause I'll grab you by the hair of the head/ And lift you off the ground/I'm here to tell you gal to lay off a my man/If you don't want to go to Fist City."
The song was inspired by a less-than-cordial conversation Lynn had with a female school bus driver who was getting a little too cozy with Lynn's husband, Doo Lynn, while the singer was out on tour.
Decades before Carrie Underwood ever threatened to take a Louisville slugger to her boyfriend's four-wheel drive, Lynn was writing songs about women fed up with men who didn't act right.
Included are ditties with titles like: "Don't Come Home A Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)," "Your Squaw is on the Warpath" and "You Ain't Woman Enough."
"I was just writin' about what I was goin' through is all," Lynn explains. "But what made those songs hits is that other women were going through the same things. But back then, women just didn't talk about such things. A song like 'Fist City?' About 80 percent of all women have probably been in that situation."
On the heels of "Van Lear Rose," her 2004 critically acclaimed album produced by White Stripes rocker Jack White, Lynn is back in the studio working with Johnny Cash, Jr. on a new batch of songs, re-recording old ones and compiling a new religious album.
And Lynn still writes on a guitar.
"I love to write," she says. "I'd rather write than sing. You can kinda tell things on yourself but nobody knows what line is true and which one you made up!"
The songwriter might even be mulling a sequel to her 1969 classic "Coal Miner's Daughter."
"Back when we recorded it, [producer] Owen Bradley made me cut three verses. He told me, 'Loretta, if you don't, we're gonna end up with a seven-minute song."
So what choice Butcher Holler autobiographical cuts were edited out?
"You would ask me that!" she cackles. "Shoot if I know. It's only been 40 years."
And yes, Lynn's favorite lyrical subject once again emerges in her new material.
"Songs about cheatin' have always done me right," she laughs. "Now Doo, he didn't like some of those songs, but Doo ended up making us a lot of money over the years!"
Writing about her sometimes-tumultuous life with her husband, also known as "Mooney," a former moonshine runner, is a way of keeping him around. He died in 1996.
The singer also realizes that she remains one of the only voices left from a generation of legends that included pals like Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette and Johnny and June Carter Cash.
Quietly, Lynn recalls her final conversation with June Carter Cash, just before she died from heart surgery complications in 2003.
"Losing Johnny and June was hard for me. She called me up to tell me that John was back in the hospital. She never told me she was having surgery herself. She probably didn't want to worry me. The next day she was dead. The last thing I said to her on the phone was 'June, I love you.'"
And while the supermarket tabloids routinely titillate these days with dire headlines such as "Loretta Lynn's Brave Final Days," the performer pooh-poohs the health rumors.
"Oh, darlin' I'm fine," Lynn says. "Usually, there's a speck of truth in there, surrounded by a bunch of lies. But I sure do like to read 'em. Sometimes, my assistant will come back from the grocery store with three or four of 'em. He'll say, 'Well, lookee here, I didn't know you did that.' I tell him, 'I didn't know it either. Pass that on over here so I can see what I've been up to!"
If you go: Loretta Lynn with twin daughters The Lynns, son Ernest Ray Lynn and granddaughter Tayla Lynn. Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. Tickets: $74 and $36.50. www.ticketmaster.com.
