In Loretta Lynn's voice, the unflinching truth about love, motherhood and women's lives

Loretta Lynn had a voice made for telling the truth.

High and flinty, with a bone-deep coal-country drawl that refused to fade even as she ascended to a queenly position in the Nashville star system, her singing sliced through polished arrangements like a sharpened blade. It could embody both the pain of betrayal and the thirst for revenge; it carried a longing for the comforts of home at the same time that it imagined ways to improve on the old days. And though she easily navigated tricky melodies — spare a thought for the" — her delivery was always straightforward: . If Lynn, who died Tuesday at age 90, ever learned to soft-pedal an emotion, she never revealed it onstage or in the studio.