Get Back Home, Loretta; A country legend inspired by a rocking White Stripe.(Loretta Lynn)

Byline: Lorraine Ali

There are at least half a dozen sequined gowns stuffed into the small closet on Loretta Lynn's big purple tour bus. "I like this one a whole lot," she says, running her hand down the shiny satin skirt of a beaded yellow number. The singer's gearing up for a tour to promote her new album, "Van Lear Rose." She reaches in to find another favorite, but accidentally pulls out a worn pink chenille robe instead. "Here she is, folks," she says, waving her hand over the tattered material. "The fabulous Loretta Lynn!"

Lynn may be a country-music legend and an American icon, but she's still the scabby-kneed Appalachian girl who married at 14, played one of her first gigs on the lawn of a sanitarium and had six kids before scoring her first top 10 hit. The 5-foot-2 Grand Ole Opry star sang songs for overworked housewives, such as "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" and "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," and by 1971 became a household name with "Coal Miner's Daughter," a ballad about her poor but happy childhood. By the 1980s, she had written 27 No. 1 hits. But Nashville was going pop, and Lynn became a symbol of country music's past: revered but not relevant. Now, thanks to an odd pairing with a garage rocker from Detroit, Lynn is hot again. Guitarist Jack White of White Stripes produced "Van Lear Rose" and recorded the songs as they did in the old days--in one or two takes. The result is spontaneous, raw and Lynn's most compelling work in years: sentimental one minute, knock-your-teeth-out tough the next.

The extremes on her album mirror the tumult of her marriage to Oliver Lynn (a.k.a. Doolittle, or Doo) almost 60 years ago. Fed up with his drinking and bullying early on, Lynn says, she decked him one night. Though their relationship was mercurial, he was the one who pushed the shy Loretta to stardom. "Doo came in from work and I was singing the babies to sleep," recalls Lynn, who just turned 70. "He thought I was ...