Jean Shepard, a mainstay of the Grand Ole Opry whose feisty honky-tonk songs of the 1950s and ’60s paved the way for the brash, assertive style of singers like Loretta Lynn, died on Sunday in Gallatin, Tenn. She was 82.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s and heart disease, her husband, Benny Birchfield, said.

Ms. Shepard, who grew up on the country blues of Jimmie Rodgers and the western swing of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, brought a freewheeling, cheeky style to the eternal themes of heartache, cheating and marital discord, planting the flag for independent women.

“Stand by your man” became “call out your man” in songs like “The Root of All Evil (Is a Man)” and “Many Happy Hangovers to You.” She suggested she might be ready for a little adventure herself in “Twice the Lovin’ in Half the Time” and dared speak up for women on the wrong side of a love affair in “The Other Woman.”

She was small — “She’d have to stand on a stepladder to pick corn,” one television host said by way of introduction — but her voice was powerful, pure and penetrating, not unlike Webb Pierce’s weapons-grade tenor. She was also an expert yodeler, a skill she showed off in her 1964 hit “Second Fiddle (to an Old Guitar).”