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Personnel: Loretta Lynn (vocals). Liner Note Author: Keith Glass. This set combines two of Loretta Lynn's late-'60s LPs for Decca Records, 1968's Fist City and 1969's Your Squaw Is on the Warpath on a single disc, adding in eight bonus tracks that were released as singles during the same time period. Neither of the original albums is a masterpiece as such, but both contained sides that made clear that Lynn wasn't going to be anyone's run of the mill female country singer. Lynn wrote and sang out of her life, and songs like "Fist City," "Let Me Go, You're Hurtin' Me," "I Don't Wanna Play House," and the single "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" all spoke of real , complicated, and often destructive relationships with a voice that was both tough and tender at the same time. Lynn may have seemed pliable and southern polite in the eye of the general public, but she was always her own person, both inside and outside the music business, and she called a spade a spade when it was dropped on the card table. Her spirit, candor, and directness as both a singer and a songwriter prefigures the stance many contemporary female country singers take mostly for granted. Lynn was marketed as the Coal Miner's Daughter, which she was, but she was also a woman who wanted to speak openly and directly about the way dysfunction can control and define relationships. These two albums aren't tightly written treatises, but some of the songs are, and there's no way that songs like "Fist City" or "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" can be mistaken for generic Nashville fare. Lynn broke ground as a country star by being herself, and she never wavered from that. ~ Steve Leggett