I Will Always Love Y'all

by Jasmine Odessa Rizer

Judging from the stories, it seems to me as that some of the coolest and most interesting people on my mom's side of the family died either before I was born or when I was still too young to appreciate them fully. There was my great-uncle, for instance, who got perms in the kitchen long before it was socially acceptable for men to get perms. Or my great-grandmother, who gave him the perms and was otherwise awesome in nearly every sense of the word. Then there was my great-grandma's sister, Daisy, who actually prayed up a boyfriend for my mother once, when she decided Mom had been single for too long. The boyfriend turned out to be defective, but I think that was his own fault rather than Daisy's. Not having known them makes me feel like I got cheated out of a lot of people to look up to. Mom is so superior to me in so many ways that rather than try to imitate her, I just do whatever she tells me to do, knowing it will most likely make things turn out right for me. One night not long ago, though, I sat at my computer listening to one of those "Ladies of Country" type compilations, and I realized that there was an entire can of role-model worms that I hadn't even opened in my mind yet.

I am not a country gal in real life, unless a pair of cowboy boots makes me one. And I really don't think it does. Still, who wouldn't want to be like Patsy Cline? Patsy Cline was sexy before anybody else knew how to be sexy. She wore all that lipstick and had perfect 1950's hair yet you get the feeling Patsy Cline could have kicked your BUTT. Every girl singer who stands onstage looking sultry, while having a black belt in karate or a multi-million dollar corporation at her command is but a pale imitation of Patsy Cline. I used to have a live album of a Patsy Cline concert that took place soon after her car crash. On this album, Patsy laughs heartily about the accident. She also mentions her earlier intentions to make it to this particular concert if she had to crawl there. Did I mention that she was sexy?

I've also got a soft spot for Bobbie Gentry for similar reasons. Bobbie Gentry had enormous 1960's hair, and you could probably fend off a tiger with just one pair of those false eyelashes she wore. Still, she spent enough time away from her mirror to come up with some of the most brilliant, miserable songs I've ever heard.

Then there's Dolly Parton. I cannot even begin to express here my love for Dolly Parton. That would have to be an essay of its own.

The same goes for Loretta Lynn. She seems to be as remarkable a person as she is a musician. She grew up decades ago in the sticks of Kentucky, yet she instinctively grasps that it's Okay To Be Gay and thinks it's hilarious when women in male drag flirt with her from the audience. She also instinctively grasped that it was wrong of certain parties in Nashville to ask her not to embrace Charley Pride, who is black, at an awards ceremony. As a matter of fact, in the picture I've seen of the occasion, she appears to have downright flung her arms around him. Not bad for a coal miner's daughter from a cabin in a hill in Butcher Holler.

I realize that many of these ladies have led rough-and-tumble lives that would make my own checkered past seem positively tame, but nonetheless, there are ways in which I hold them up as examples of what I wish I could be.

"Bobbie Gentry," I can think admiringly, "probably doesn't have a big tattoo that she got in a drunken stupor after a funeral. Dolly Parton," I can lecture myself, "probably never got drunk and made out with the nanny at a New Year's party."

Maybe in order to keep our role models, we need not to know too much about them. Otherwise, we find out they're not very nice people, or we learn so much about their virtues that we become intimidated, and give up on the possibility that we could ever be anything like them.

I may never be able to match my mother for sheer patience and strength, but good fashion like Patsy Cline's is within my grasp, just as long as the people who sell the cowboy boots will take my credit card.