This past week, we lost the great Loretta Lynn, and ever since, it seems the entire music community (not just country) has come together to talk about their favorite songs, stories, and covers.
One of my favorites is this 2009 cover of “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” performed by the wildly popular band Paramore, who is very much not country.
Their Spotify bio even says that “no one understood how a band so un-country could be from this strange little town called Nashville.”
But while a big running joke by so many people is that they like all types of music except country, everyone actually does like country, and anyone who says different is just flat out lying or hasn’t found their brand of country.
Hayley Williams, lead singer of Paramore, kinda confirms this by saying at the beginning of the video that she used to not listen to a lot of country until she started touring, and then, country is what reminded her of home.
So, with Loretta Lynn being one of her favorites, she performs this actually insanely amazing cover of “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” without a microphone.
She just asks the audience to quiet down and starts singing.
And while Williams is from the south, I totally wasn’t expecting to hear such a twang from her voice, such a pleasant surprise from the pop-punk star.
The cover must have been pretty well received because on the 2010 album Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn, along with covers by country artists like Gretchen Wilson and Miranda Lambert and other non-country artists like The White Stripes, Paramore’s version of this Loretta Lynn classic is featured.
I gotta admit that I’m always a little bit skeptical whenever I see a non-country artist covering a very traditional country song, but this performance is awesome and a great tribute to the late Loretta Lynn.
The studio version:
