Loretta Lynn was the first woman selected Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association and was one of the first women to be elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. To many, she is the Queen of Country Music, yet until this box set was released in 1994, a 20 track greatest hits cd was the most in-depth retrospective available on Lynn's career. Honky Tonk Girl goes a long way towards revealing why Lynn is so special. It contains 70 recordings over three discs. Many of its tracks were appearing on cd for the first time with their enclosure here.

Disc one covers Lynn's formative years (1960 - 1966). Leading off its Lynn's first single (and hit) on the Zero label "Honky Tonk Girl" as well as its B-side "Whispering Sea." Neither had been in print in over 20 years when included here and it is easy to see why. Lynn's voice is so wobbly throughout that you'd never guess a stellar career lay ahead at Decca Records under the guidance of top producer Owen Bradley.

Lynn's early records at Decca were very much in the traditional female country vein. "Success," "The Other Woman," and "Blue Kentucky Girl" were the first big hits and all have a subservient theme. 1965's "You Ain't Woman Enough" and 1966's "Don't Come Home A Drinkin'" changed that mentality. These feisty declarations were also the first hits Lynn wrote at Decca. Suddenly, Lynn was a voice and role model for women everywhere. Not coincidentally, her singing became a lot stronger as well.

The second disc showcases Lynn at her commercial and artistic peak (1967 - 1971). Lynn wrote most of her hits during this period and no subject appears to have been off-limits. "Fist City" finds Lynn willing to get physical to keep her man while "Rated X" discusses the stigma placed on divorced on women. "One's On The Way" humorously poked at the drudgeries of being a housewife with a lot of kids. Country pride also played a prominent role in Lynn's music during this era with "You're Looking At Country" and "Coal Miner's Daughter" which has become Lynn's signature song and spawned an autobiographical book and film.

Disc three covers Lynn's later years with Decca and its parent company MCA. With 1972's controversial "The Pill", Lynn stopped writing her own material. Her musical stylings expanded as well, with "Trouble In Paradise" finding Lynn experimenting with rock (and sounding extremely ill at ease). Pop-flavored ballads like "When The Tingle Becomes A Chill" also became more common as Lynn's distinctive sound became watered down during the mid-to-late 1970s. In the 1980s, Lynn's recording career went into severe decline, and the box set wisely limits the representation from this time period to the sumptuous ballad "I Lie" (her last top 10 hit) and her final MCA single "Who Was That Stranger."

In addition to Lynn's solo recordings, duet hits with Ernest Tubb and Conway Twitty are sprinkled throughout the set. The major hits with Twitty missing here ("Louisian Woman Mississippi Man" and "Feelings") can be found on Twitty's equally well-done four-disc companion set. There are a few major singles by Lynn that weren't included ("Home," "You've Come A Long Way Baby," and my personal fave "Red, White, and Blue"), but it is undeniably one of the best done box sets on a country artist.

At the start of the sixties, female singers had a really hard tine getting noticed, except Patsy Cline. Loretta (along with Dolly and Tammy) helped to change this forever, by recording songs that appealed to women as well as men. While men (including myself) can be satisfied with women singing love songs, Loretta recorded some hard-hitting songs about life and it's struggles.

Examples of her diverse themes include her heritage (Coal miners' daughter), fending off other women (You ain't woman enough), everyday life (One's on the way), anti-Vietnam protest (Uncle Sam), the evil of drinking too much (Don't come home a-drinking), gospel (Who says God is dead?), birth control (The pill) and the occasional humorous song (You're the reason our kids are so ugly) - although my favorite humorous song of Loretta's (Mad Mrs Jesse Brown) is not included. All the others mentioned can be found on this collection. Of course, she sings love songs too and plenty of those are included on this set, although these are not what Loretta is best remembered for.

In this collection, you will also find covers of Blueberry hill (a song associated with Fatso Domino but first recorded by Glenn Miller), These boots are made for walking (Nancy Sinatra), There goes my everything (successful on the country charts for Jack Greene, but later covered by Engelbert Humperdinck and Elvis Presley, both of whom had pop hits with the song) and She's got you (a Patsy Cline song which Loretta also had a huge country hit with), plus duets with Ernest Tubb and Conway Twitty.

70 tracks cannot due full justice to Loretta, but this is by far the most comprehensive collection so far released. We all have our favorite tracks among those omitted, but all the essentials are here, despite some charted singles being excluded.

I may disagree with her politics and find some of the lyrics questionable as we head into the new millennium, but for sass, spirit and sheer gutsy singing, get this and learn the music of one of the most important artists who broke down the walls of what "girl singers" could do. There's much more here than "Coal Miner's Daughter" and sentimental slop about being at poverty's/death's/heartbreak's door but sure that love will do, well something or other. Singing about "The Pill" on--if I am not mistaken (I did watch it when it first aired)--Dinah Shore's chitchat fest while having an afterschool snack...! Now there's a childhood memory for you. Some of this is kitsch, yes, some of it is, shall we say, emeshed in its time, but all of it is indispensible to any serious country music lover's collection. And I didn't even get paid to write that! (Actually 4.5 out of 5)

Anyone who has MCA's 20 GREATEST HITS (or pick just about any of the single disc collections; they're almost all pretty much the same), will already have practically a whole CD's worth from this collection. One of the best of Loretta's up-tempo hits, "We've Come A Long Way Baby" is missing, the only one from 20 GREATEST HITS that's not here. So I guess my complaint is simply this: for a boxed set covering one of country music's greatest and most prolific singers, this 3-CD set is kind of skimpy. Another disc would have been really nice, especially if it were a collection of rarities and lesser-known tracks, and I would have gladly shelled out a few more bucks. At the very least, each of these discs has significant room left over into which a few more songs could have been stuffed, as others have pointed out. I've noticed that the country music industry, in particular, seems to hold to a standard of brevity, even while musicians in other genres are taking advantage more and more often of the amount of space afforded by the CD format (as opposed to the vinyl it has replaced). Just go to the country music section of your local music store and thumb through the new CD's; you'll see what I mean: most of the C & W artists still only put ten or eleven songs on their latest releases. Oh well, back to Loretta, at least what is here is good to great (mostly great). The liner notes are informative (if also kind of brief), and there are some nice pictures in the booklet. Excepting the first couple of songs on Disc 1, the sound quality is crisp and clear. I bought this from a third party seller through Amazon, so at least I didn't fork over too much money, and I am, whatever my criticisms, happy. Loretta Lynn is one of the finest and most important singer/songwriters of all time, in any genre!

I love listening to Loretta's voice. It's enjoyable to listen in the car diving down the road. It's not like the music now days.