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Kentucky legend Loretta Lynn may not have been the first female country star to elbow her way into Nashville’s boys’ club in the early ’60s, but she was the first to make the female experience—and all the social pressures and double standards that come with it—central to her songbook.

Lynn’s bold and soulful voice was matched by her eagerness to smuggle countercultural notions about birth control (“The Pill”) and divorce (“Rated ‘X’”) into the Grand Ole Opry, establishing the archetype for the taboo-breaching Music City provocateur that endures through the likes of the Dixie Chicks, Kacey Musgraves, and Miranda Lambert.