Wynonna's album The Hard Truth starts with a moving and complex tribute to and indictment of her mother.
Hey, hey Mama can you hear me now
I'm far from heaven but I'm screaming loud
You held the curse from your mama's hands
For me to wear around me like a family brand
Well, I was left here in the space between
Where you couldn't love you, so how could love me?
If you left your demons back in the holler
Why the hell you dragging me into muddy waters?
Kentucky roots burnin' deep in our blood
And there's some things that you just can't rise above.
Kentucky blood harmonies
The whole world heard but they couldn't see
The price it cost you and me
Naomi Judd (she and Wynonna constituted the great country duo the Judds) died by suicide, and the history of mental illness and substance abuse in that family is devastating, despite its artistic and economic success. This album, in which all the songs but one were co-written by Wynonna, amounts to an autobiography, an expression of pain and an underlying joy, all of it crystallized in Wynonna's great voice.
"The dirt made me. The dirt made me, like a mother with no shame made me," she sings, shockingly on "Kentucky Queen." Who sings like that about their mom, much less about their mom the beloved country star? But Wynonna has been freed to tell the truth as she experienced it, hard as it may be.
A different day
The same ol' call
Lost your mind in Mobile
Fallin' off again
It's too far, I can't find you
A counterfeit fix, that's what you run to
I know, Lord, I know
It's a strange transaction
That nobody wins, but I buy in
Oh, here we go again
And I'm desperate for change
From the rain and stormy weather
I would drag you out of Hell if I could
But I don't have the power
I can't save you, but I try
I don't want to, but I still believe
In a hopeful lie
I hear this song as being about the struggle when someone you love is in and out of rehab, for drug abuse or mental illness issues. She's saying (I think) that she believed it, or tried to, or said she did, each time Naomi headed toward a recovery, or got more therapy. But perhaps the song is about her daughter Grace, who’s had similar struggles and is currently in jail. In any case, the song registers how the pain has been exacerbated by hope, which is a terrible truth. But she manages to sing about these matters directly, with no obscurity or evasion, and I hope that expressing it with this sort of intensity will help her.
Wynonna’s one of our greatest singers, certainly one of the greatest and most distinctive female country singers, but also a real bluesy growler whose solo oeuvre has expressed a consistent engagement with American roots music, a late-breaking Bonnie Raitt or Linda Ronstadt, or maybe a not-late-breaking Susan Tedeschi or Brandi Carlile, with both of whom she has collaborated. She was never restricted to country music, though few have ever sung better in the style.
One of the many things I like about the new album is that Wynonna isn't deflecting or obscuring what she's thinking. At her mother's funeral, I gather she said she was "broken and blessed" by her mother's life and death. The song Broken and Blessed gives a direct, almost simple, expression to a complex bundle of feelings. I might not know much about their relationship, but you could tell it was complicated. Maybe Naomi tried to get her family out of poverty in rural Kentucky by driving her talented daughter to perform, supervising her every phrase from the time she was a teenager, standing next to her onstage as her supervisor, whether she was really singing harmonies or not.
But that daughter really is transcendent. I've been listening to the whole oeuvre of the Judds and solo Wynonna. It's amazingly consistent in its tastefulness and the intensity of its expression. I think if you like Adele, for example, and are frustrated that she doesn't have more albums out, you should listen to Wynonna's albums form the 1990s and early-2000s, such as New Day Dawning, The Other Side, and What the World Needs Now is Love. We might think of her genre by then as soul blues. Her last album, Wynonna and the Big Noise was excellent, with a number of cool and unusual songs. But that was 10 years ago. Wynonna's back.
The Hard Truth represents a sort of culmination of Wynonna's career, and a beautiful and fraught zone of self-reflection. I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Wynonna at this phase, but maybe not this courageous memoir.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell