The classic 1969 soul album “Dusty in Memphis” kicks off with “Just a Little Lovin,’” a perfect, dreamy nugget of blue-eyed soul wherein British chanteuse Dusty Springfield proclaims that a.m. lovemaking “beats a cup of coffee for starting off the day.” (And you believe her.)
Country iconoclast Shelby Lynne released a record of songs made famous by Springfield early this year — in fact, she titled it “Just a Little Lovin.’” It’s worth pointing out that Lynne’s sultry version of the titular tune is, at 5 minutes, 21 seconds, more than twice as long as the original. Given the song’s subject, we have to ask: Is Lynne trying to get us in dutch with our bosses or what?
“Hopefully, yes,” laughs Lynne, 40. “That’s my job, isn’t?”
We’ll take her word for it. Lynne, who was born in Quantico but now lives in California, has spent a lot of time and thought figuring out her job. She hadn’t yet left her teens when she recorded a duet with George Jones (“If I Could Bottle This Up”) and landed a record deal. Lynne had a handful of successful country singles in her early 20s, but she didn’t write those songs and no longer performs them.
“I was a young’un; I was just doing what they wanted me to do,” she recalls. “You learn real quick that you don’t want to do that if you’re me.” Frustrated with the material her label was pushing her to record, Lynne quit Nashville for California and began writing her own songs.
Her independent streak paid off in 2000, when “I Am Shelby Lynne” — an album embraced by rock and country audiences alike — snagged her a Best New Artist Grammy. It was her sixth album, but Grammy rules are funny like that.
“I’m glad to have it, that’s all I know,” Lynne says. “Looks good on a resume, you know?”
Lynne has continued to blaze her own trail on subsequent releases. Her prior album to “Just a Little Lovin,’” 2005’s “Suit Yourself,” is probably the most intimate and accomplished set of her career. It included a different kind of tribute to a singer she admired: Lynne wrote “Johnny Met June” on the morning she learned of Johnny Cash’s death in 2003. “June” is, of course, June Carter Cash, who married Johnny in 1968 and remained with him until her death, which preceded Cash’s by four months.
The song came “out of the air,” Lynne says. “It was a true inspirational moment. You really don’t have any control. [The song] just kind of moves through you, and you go, ‘Oh, there it is.’ ”
“Just a Little Lovin’” features but one Lynne original, an elegy for a love affair entitled “Pretend.”
“It was the only song I had that would stand up” to the Springfield classics, she says. “I’d had that song for several years. It just kind of fell onto the record, and we knew it was right.”
Lynne says that while she’s enjoyed paying tribute, she won’t be making another covers album.
“I don’t want to become a karaoke machine,” she declares. “I’ve got my own songs to write.”
If you go
Shelby Lynne with Jim Bianco
Where: The Birchmere
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Info: $25; 703-549-7900; www.birchmere.com
