Not gonna lie, I used to absolutely jam to Paramore’s “Still Into You” back in the day.
And the band’s lead singer Hayley Williams is actually a Nashville native, believe it or not, though they certainly fall way outside of the country genre obviously, making alternative/pop rock music.
Their Spotify bio even says that “no one understood how a band so un-country could be from this strange little town called Nashville,” and I’d say that’s probably a perfect way to put it.
And of course, country is my favorite genre of music, but I’m a music fan in general, and have always appreciated artists who can dabble in more than one (or at the very least, do the cover songs justice), like Hayley, for example.
She might be a pop rock queen, but the girl can sing some dang country music when she wants to, and being a Tennessee girl at heart, she paid her respects to the queen Loretta Lynn at the Grand Ole Opry over the weekend.
Hayley crushed a cover of Loretta’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” which was the title track to her 1966 album of the same name.
It peaked at #2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, ultimately becoming one of her signature songs, and it’s always been one of my personal favorites too.
Hayley admitted to the crowd that she’s not an expert picker by any means, but she wanted to play the song anyways being that they were at the Opry:
“This was the original song I wanted to play tonight, because we played it at the Ryman, our first show at the Ryman ever, and in honor of Mrs. Loretta Lynn, I wanna play it again.
I’m not gonna do any fancy pickin’, so we’re just gonna get right into it.”
She took the stage with just a simple acoustic guitar, sans the rest of the band, and it’s impressive how incredible her vocals really are.
She certainly did Mrs. Loretta proud with this cover, that’s for sure:
Hayley also did an incredible solo performance of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” noting how nervous she was to be up there alone with just her acoustic guitar, but I think she absolutely crushed it:
“You Ain’t Woman Enough”
