“Portland, Oregon” by Loretta Lynn with Jack White

"Portland, Oregon" had been sitting in Loretta Lynn's attic on an old scrap of paper until Jack White turned it up, and in 2004 the two of them cut it as a duet for her album Van Lear Rose, with White producing. It was one of a handful of long-buried Lynn songs that got a second life on that record, and critics liked it plenty when it went out as a single.

The story behind it is pure country. Lynn once faked a romance with her guitarist, Cal Smith, at a hotel in Portland to make her husband Mooney jealous, since he'd been stepping out himself, as she told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes in 2005. White turns it into a slow, grinding barroom drama, the two of them trading lines like people who know better and don't care. Eric McConnell recorded it, and White mixed it with Stuart Sikes.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.