The Irish vocalist was synonymous with a rock & roll spirit but also covered Nashville icons like Dolly Parton and even duetted with Willie Nelson
Sinéad O’Connor was as world-renowned for fervid rock & roll and adventurous pop as she was for her defiant stance on often-controversial issues. But the Irish-born musician also recorded a handful of modern country-music covers — and even performed a duet with a country legend.
O’Connor, whose death at age 56 was announced Wednesday, was already a galvanizing figure in popular music when she released her third album, Am I Not Your Girl, in the fall of 1992. A collection of lushly orchestrated jazz and pre-rock pop covers, the LP also included O’Connor’s brilliant take on Loretta Lynn’s first Top Ten hit, the 1962 single “Success.” Released by O’Connor under the title “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home,” the song was not written by Lynn, but by Johnny Mullins, who also penned Lynn’s smash “Blue Kentucky Girl.”
Calling it “the most biographical song on the album [and] the one that is the most personal to her because of the abused she suffered as a child, at the hands of her mother, O’Connor told the Los Angeles Times upon its release, “I didn’t see it in terms of being a country song even though Loretta Lynn recorded it… but as a song that expressed something important… how everyone is concerned with material success and what that can do to people. Success has made a failure of our home… my home.”
In 1993, O’Connor teamed up with Willie Nelson for his album Across the Borderline, a project that featured Nelson’s interpretations of songs by Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, among others. With O’Connor as his duet partner, Nelson also recorded a version of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.”
O’Connor also contributed her thickly atmospheric version of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” to 1995’s Help: A Charity Project for the Children of Bosnia. Eight years later, in 2003, not long after Dolly Parton’s original version of “Dagger Through the Heart” from her Halos & Horns album was nominated for a Grammy, O’Connor issued her own breathtaking acoustic take on the bluegrass tune. Where Parton’s vocal fragility took center stage on the original, O’Connor’s was distinguished by her patented brand of spiky resolve. Also in 2003, O’Connor paid homage to Hall of Fame songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant with a glittering and heartfelt rendition of their iconic hit “Love Hurts,” which was issued on the two-disc set She Who Dwells.