Jack White Remasters Loretta Lynn's 'Van Lear Rose' Two Decades On

Loretta Lynn's Grammy-winning 2004 album Van Lear Rose returns to streaming this week after a seven-year absence, remastered by producer Jack White and reissued on his Third Man Records with a bonus track, "Just to Have You Back." White, now 51, was 28 when he recorded it. Lynn was 71.

"I could talk about this record forever and not get bored with it," White told Rolling Stone, getting close to tears numerous times during the interview. He calls the experience "outstanding and life-affirming."

The album's impact has never wavered, even when its availability did. White doesn't know why it left streaming in the first place. "You'd have to talk to the Loretta Lynn Estate about that," he said. A family representative told Rolling Stone they are "so excited for the release of a project that Loretta loved so much."

How did a garage rocker end up producing a country legend?

White was a longtime Lynn fan. The White Stripes dedicated their 2001 album White Blood Cells to her and routinely covered her song "Rated X" live, with Meg White singing. Lynn invited the duo to her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, cooked homemade chicken and dumplings, and gave Meg a red dress from her attic. "Meg was crying, we couldn't believe it," White recalled. "We were nowhere near the neighborhood of someone she should know about and care about."

At that kitchen table, Lynn mentioned she might want to make another record. White threw his name in. "I put my hand up like some ridiculous notion while I'm eating chicken, saying, 'Well, if you ever need a producer for that record, just give me a holler,'" he said. "And Loretta did, and she trusted me somehow."

Before the sessions, Lynn showed him hundreds of legal pads of songs stored under her bedroom tanning bed. "The first 10 things we pulled out, that's the album," White said.

Why did country radio reject a Grammy winner?

Van Lear Rose won the Grammy for Best Country Album, and the duet "Portland Oregon" won another. Nashville radio, however, wanted nothing to do with it. White recalls sitting next to Jerry Lee Lewis's guitar player on a flight home from the Grammys, who found it "pretty hilarious that Loretta got nominated for five country Grammys and not any country music awards that year." White sees that split as the story's point: "There's a business side to things, and there's a big heart and realistic roots side in the same town, fighting for attention."

The mainstream snub worked as an accidental endorsement. Recorded on eight-track tape in East Nashville with White's non-session band — Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence of the Greenhornes, later of the Raconteurs — the album introduced younger listeners to Lynn and to country music itself. White mixed his own duet vocals lower out of respect, fought to keep his name off the packaging, and calls "Portland Oregon" the longest intro Lynn ever had before she sang a word.

The record reshaped both careers. It prompted White's permanent move to Tennessee, where Third Man Records has prioritized analog releases, intimate shows, and artists like Margo Price whom Music Row had passed over. White now calls Lynn "the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century," citing her songs about the birth control pill as "hardcore feminism, at the perfect time."

Lynn wanted a sequel. "We can't top it, but we could do something underneath it," she told him. It never happened, but White may yet write a book about where art meets business — a corridor he's been mapping since his teenage upholstery shop. He says he's largely done producing, though: bedroom laptop musicians don't need him the way a guitar player once did.