The Lynns

BY:Michael A. Capozzoli JR.

(Pa-Patsy Lynn)-What we were listening to back then on the radio was a whole lot of different musical experiences.

I was telling my niece who moved here from California a but ago that once you move to Nashville and live here for about a year, all of your musical tastes change in a different direction.

(Pa)- When you are a twin you do fight for your own identity. Because when you’re a twin and you grow up, people see you as one person. There is a total difference between the two of us, because you may look like your twin on the outside but you’re a whole different person from your twin on the inside.

(PE-Peggy Lynn)- Patsy is my favorite songwriter, because I can be honest with her and upfront about any thing that you’re working on under any conditions, and what can she do?

When we’re writing a song, if we give each other a bad line for the lyrics, we can say to each other,’That is the worst line you could ever come up with.’ And,you can’t get mad. She’s your sister.

(PA)- Whenever we bring in a third person for songwriting, first of all it’s probably one of our husband’s because we want to share on the publishing royalties. We’re a little greedy on the publishing side of things. What happens is one of our husbands will be there and we’ll get stuck whenever we’re writing a song and we’ll ask them to join in and then suddenly, before we know it they’re asking us for credit.

(PE)- To compare today with when my mother was starting out, well country music was mainly a man’s world and the country charts where a man’s chart.

There’ weren’t many women on it. So it was very competitive but in a different way from today. Right now, it’s survival of the fittest, country music is very competitive. I think something that’s real, and that people can relate to and is die-hard true to their country music, I honestly believe that country music, well that attitude will come out in the end in the music. You have to be patient, it’s like the turtle, wins the race in the

(PA)- I guess my dad was the first radio promotional guy back when he and mom did it. It’s really difficult to do a radio promotional tour, because these are the people who are playing what you hear on radio. We met a lot of people who actually were in radio when my mom and dad came around on their first radio promotional tour all those years ago. We were in St. Louis, Missouri at WIL, the heritage station. The guy who is running the station as the general manager, we met with recently and he told us he was the disc jockey when my mother came by in 1961. He was talking about meeting her back then and he told us when my mom left, he said,’Boy, I feel so sorry for her. I just don’t think she is going to make it.’ About two years later,he told us he had to eat those words over and over again every time he played one of moms songs on the air. You know, when you listen to the radio and you hear a new artist, then you turn around and say to someone,’You know, I just don’t get that.’ Then one day they’re superstars.

(PE)- You have to write the music that’s in your heart and in your gut, not what the radio guys are telling you or the marketing department at the record company is telling you.

You have to create what you, the artist wants to express from inside of you. Hopefully, the masses will understand it. But, there are songs that we’ve written that are so personal and so private, that those songs would never get on the radio. But you know what? That’s OK. It’s our art. You have to write what’s true to you.

(PA)- That’s what songwriters do. It’s a way to ventilate their personal experiences. Not all of their experiences are necessarily going to be accepted as commercial. You know, I think that we’re different. I think that we’re fresh. You know what? I think that country music needs something different and something fresh. So, we’re exactly what country music needs. I don’t think we’re left of center, we’re right down the pike, it’s just that we’re waiting for the other automobiles to get out of my way.

(PE)- We’re waiting for Alan Jackson to call us to go on his tour. But I think we scared him a little. We’re both with CAA. I don’t think he’d ever make it to the stage anyway, we’d have him ducktaped in the back of the bus.

(PA)- My mom is one of these people who go 150 miles an hour and gives so much of herself until she collapses. In a lot of ways I have that tendency to drive and drive without stopping, so I understand how it is.

This is something that you have to do, it’s a job and it also has to be something that’s in your heart. You can’t prefab a career in country music. You can’t want to love having a career in country music, you have to love wanting a career in country music. You can fool some of the people who are country music fans, but you can’t fool all of them. They can see right through it. I think that’s one advantage Peggy and I have being raised in this business, you can see both sides. We were telling somebody, this is a business, the road is hard and you can never forget that. You have to love it, it’s called 100 per cent, or you can not make it in this business.

(PE)-You know it used to drive me crazy traveling with my mom in the bus on tour. Because she would never pull the shades up in her room in the back of the bus. In the summer, we’d be traveling with her and we’d sit up in the font because we got tired in sitting there with her in the back of the bus with the shades pulled down over her windows. The one misconception that people have about Patsy and I is that we were raised on this tour bus and we had Johnny Cash and Earnest Tubb eating dinner with us back home every night we were there. Those things never happened. We lived 65 miles outside of Nashville in the middle of no where, population the Lynn family thank you. It was strictly work everyday. We would have to take care of the farm. We had horses we’d have to take care of and if we came to Nashville three or four times a year, that was a big deal.

(PA)- I still live at Hurricane Mills, just about three miles from my families ranch. I was assistant manager there until two years ago, when Peggy and I started playing and performing together. But today, time just doesn’t allow me to do that. This is a 24 hour a day job.

(PE)- We were so sheltered back then so I didn’t get to see a lot of the publicity in the newspapers and the tabloids that surrounded my mother. What was funny about that back the though was that when my mother was singing with Conway Twitty, everybody assumed that me and Patsy where mom and Conways’ daughters. It was really funny because on the road people would come up to us and say,’Oh you look just like your daddy Conway!’ So all the attention my mother had from the press was amusing at times. But on the other hand, when my brother passed away, there was helicopters flying around the family ranch and all the papers where printing things about that, well, it’s a total invasion of that grieving period and that time. It’s things that you read about my father and our family in the papers, can be very hurtful.

(PA)- We’re not leery about publicity and the papers now, but we know both sides of it from firsthand experience.

I think what my mother did as a reaction to all the publicity was, instead of trying to hide everything about their lives, be open about everything. You know I think more people who are celebrities should do that. There’s going to be some bad things that happen, but when you’re open and there’s nothing for them to find, then it’s better that way.

(PE)- You know some people don’t want the public to see the bad part of it all.

(PA)- The thing about this for us is you do interviews and be as honest as you can and people are going to form there own opinions about you and writers are going to write whatever they want to.