Loretta Lynn was a groundbreaking country singer and songwriter whose hits included the controversial “The Pill” and the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
- Died: October 4, 2022 (Who else died on October 4?)
- Details of death: Died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee at the age of 90.
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Country music legend
Lynn’s life and career were the stuff of country music legend, set in stone with her bestselling 1976 autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and the 1980 hit movie it inspired. Raised in poverty in the hills of Kentucky, she married as a young teen and had four children in quick succession. But the trajectory of her life changed when her husband bought her a guitar and encouraged her to sing. Her heartfelt honky-tonk music hit a chord with listeners, and she became one of the most revered women of country music history.
The story told in the movie takes a few twists and turns from the real-life story that began with the birth of Loretta Webb, who was named after the movie star Loretta Young (1913–2000), on April 14, 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. But it outlined the truth of an extraordinary tale. Most of the children born during the Depression to coal miners – Lynn’s father, Ted Webb, really was one – didn’t grow up to be honored by the Academy of Country Music as Artist of the Decade. What brought Lynn to those heights was a combination of natural-born skill, an ear for the poetry of the hill country, and a brash refusal to play it safe. Her husband’s determination to make his wife a star didn’t hurt, either.
Young life
Lynn’s early life was one filled with music – she sang in the church choir and at home, where singing filled the family home regularly. Her whole family sang, including her younger sister, Brenda, who would later become famous as country singer Crystal Gayle. But Lynn didn’t dream of becoming a country music star. Singing was just woven into the fabric of her everyday life, not a career aspiration. Her marriage at a young age seemed to guarantee that her life’s work would be as a wife and mother.
That young age was the source of some controversy. Loretta Webb was 15 years old when she married Oliver Lynn (1926–1996), better known as Doolittle, Doo, or Mooney. Doolittle was 21, a moonshine runner who earned the nickname Mooney thanks to his illicit profession. The six-year age difference between the two wasn’t so unusual. But it also doesn’t jibe with the popular legend, which holds that they were married when Loretta was just 13.
It was “Coal Miner’s Daughter” that suggested Lynn was 13 when she was married, yet in recent years, her birth certificate was made public and proved that she had fudged her age a bit. The reasoning behind the untruth may have had more to do with the singer not wanting to reveal her real age – women in entertainment can take a lot of age-related heat, after all – than an attempt to sensationalize her marriage story. But the end result was that the story ended up sensational. Fifteen is very young for marriage, to be sure, but the line between “13” and “child bride” is a much narrower one.
Shortly after her young marriage to Doolittle, Lynn was pregnant with her first and the family moved far away from her childhood home – all the way to Washington State. There, she was a mother and homemaker, giving birth to four children before she was 20. Music still ran through the background of her life, and as Doolittle heard her sing, an idea formed. Lynn told Time Out Chicago, “He’d hear me rockin’ the babies to sleep and singin’, and he said, ‘You’re just as good or better as most of them girls that are singin’ and makin’ money, so let’s make us some money.’”
Doolittle bought Lynn a guitar – a $17 guitar, according to the legend of Lynn’s life. (In 2022 dollars, that would be about a $188 guitar: decent, probably, but nothing fancy.) She taught herself to play, singing in the honky-tonk style that was a natural progression from the hill music of her childhood. She formed a band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, and began to play around town. She was writing, too, composing songs that drew upon her everyday experiences and thoughts. In 1960, she had her first chance to record one of those songs – and it was a hit.
Determined to succeed
“I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” like many of Lynn’s other songs, was written in response to something that happened to her in her daily life. In this case, it was a boozy conversation she had with a woman at a bar where Lynn was playing. The conversation, set to the music of the Bakersfield Sound and laid down on seven-inch vinyl, made it to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, thanks in large part to the unrelenting independent promotion efforts that Lynn and Doolittle undertook.
The Lynns started out by personally mailing copies of the record to radio stations. When that didn’t work – none of the stations were playing it – they launched a road trip, driving to radio stations to give them the record in person. In the book “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn remembered: “We went down the West Coast, too poor to stay in motels, sleeping in the car and eating baloney and cheese sandwiches. …When we got near a radio station, I’d hop in the back of the car and change into my dress. Then we’d go inside the radio station.” There, she would hand over her record, pester the DJ, talk on the air if they’d let her – whatever it took.
The technique worked, perhaps because it’s much harder to ignore a record when its singer is standing in front of you in her one good dress. Radio stations started playing her song, and it began to climb the chart. The success of “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” got Lynn a touring engagement with the Wilburn Brothers and, key to her future success, a spot performing on the Grand Ole Opry. From the Opry appearance came a permanent Opry spot – she joined in 1962 – and a contract with Decca Records, marking the beginning of her rise to become the top woman in country music.
Country music stardom
Her career began to blossom with her first record, 1961’s “Loretta Lynn Sings” for Decca, yielding the No. 6 single “Success.” 1963’s “Before I’m Over You” took her into the top five with the title track and “Wine, Women, and Song.” By the mid-1960s, Lynn was soaring to the top of the charts and establishing her reputation for writing no-nonsense songs about love and heartbreak: in 1966, “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” climbed to No. 2, and in that same year, Lynn finally topped the chart with “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).”
Following Lynn’s typical approach, both songs were drawn from her own life. Like her first single, “You Ain’t Woman Enough” found its genesis in a conversation with another woman, one who was worried about a rival for her husband’s affections. Even as Lynn delivered a consoling word to the other woman – “Honey, she ain’t woman enough to take your man!” – she was beginning to compose the song that she’d soon complete in 10 minutes in her dressing room.
As for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’” – that one was a sign that not all was blissful within the Lynn household. Indeed, Lynn’s music made it no secret that Doolittle was a drinker and that tempers often flared at home. Conflict ran throughout their marriage, though the Lynns stayed together until Doolittle’s death in 1996.
Controversial compositions
As Lynn continued writing songs about everyday events, she found that some of her bluntly honest songs were magnets for controversy. Among the earliest was 1968’s “Fist City,” a delightfully titled invitation to a throwdown with a woman who had been flirting with Doolittle. With lyrics including “If you don’t wanna go to Fist City you’d better detour ‘round my town/’Cause I’ll grab you by the hair of the head and I’ll lift you off of the ground,” it was belligerent, tough as nails, and banned from several radio stations even as it soared to No. 1 on the chart.
Lynn was unrepentant. In her 2000 biography, “Still Woman Enough,” she wrote of the hit single, “I’ve been in a couple of fights in my life. I fight like a woman. I scratch and kick and bite and punch. Women are much meaner than men. So I warned any girl making eyes at Doo then, and I’m still jealous enough to warn ’em today—if you see this cute little old boy near me wearing his cowboy hat, you’d better walk a circle around us if you don’t want to go to Fist City.”
She’d go on to write and record more controversial songs. 1969’s “Wings Upon Your Horns” was a lament on lost love – and lost virginity – that incorporated religious imagery in a way that was upsetting to a segment of her fan base. In 1972, “Rated ‘X’” contemplated the sexually loose reputation assigned to divorced women, and it was shocking to listeners, from its title to its frank discussion of a deeply entrenched stigma. Lynn found herself banned from radio stations again, but the controversial song was another No. 1 hit.
And then there was “The Pill,” written by T.D. Bayless. Recorded in 1972 but delayed by her label until 1975, “The Pill” was a celebration of the relatively new birth control pill and the newfound freedom it afforded women to disrupt what could otherwise be a never-ending cycle of pregnancies: “All these years I’ve stayed at home while you had all your fun/And every year that’s gone by another baby’s come/There’s a gonna be some changes made right here on nursery hill/You’ve set this chicken your last time ’cause now I’ve got the pill.” It was a topic especially important to Lynn, the mother of six, four of whom had been born in quick succession while she was still in her teens.
“If I’d had the pill back when I was havin’ babies I’d have taken ’em like popcorn,” she told People magazine in a contemporary interview. “The pill is good for people. I wouldn’t trade my kids for anyone’s. But I wouldn’t necessarily have had six and I sure would have spaced ’em better.”
Not everyone agreed with Lynn’s enthusiastic praise for the pill, and the song was lambasted from many sides, from church pulpits to the airwaves. Lynn once again found herself banned from radio stations, and a song that should have been a surefire top-three hit – probably a chart-topper, thanks to her meteoric rise to fame in the decade that preceded it – only made it to No. 5. Lynn expressed baffled bemusement when she talked to People about the kerfuffle. “Why, it’s a husband and wife, not two unmarried people, so that’s not dirty.”
Artist of the Decade
In the end, the controversies probably did more to help Lynn’s career than to hurt it. She charted 11 No. 1 solo hits in the 1960s and ‘70s, among them the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and the Shel Silverstein (1930–1999) composition “One’s on the Way.” A fruitful partnership with fellow country star Conway Twitty (1933–1993) yielded another five No. 1 singles. Dozens more, both solo and with Twitty, made their way to the charts.
The result was that Lynn achieved a level of fame previously unheard of for female country singers. She wasn’t the first woman to succeed in the genre – a handful before her had reached great heights. Kitty Wells (1919–2012) was the first; Patsy Cline (1932–1963) – a friend and mentor to Lynn – had followed. Skeeter Davis (1931–2004) and Jean Shepard (1933–2016) were also top stars of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Lynn blew past them all as she began to rake in the accolades in the early 1970s.
In 1972, Lynn became the first woman to be named Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards. That same year, she and Twitty were named Vocal Duo of the Year at the CMAs, the first year of a four-year streak. She was Entertainer of the Year again in 1975 – incidentally, the year of “The Pill” – and in 1980, the Academy of Country Music named her Artist of the Decade for the 1970s. She was the first, and remains the only, woman to receive that honor.
“Coal Miner’s Daughter”
As her career reached the stratosphere with that greatest honor, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was released in theaters in March 1980. It brought Lynn, a major star in a niche genre, to the attention of a broad audience who loved her rags-to-riches tale. Sissy Spacek won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lynn, and she was hand-picked by the singer herself, who was struck by the resemblance between the young actress and herself.
But it was Levon Helm (1940–2012), drummer for the Band in his screen debut, who best captured Lynn’s heart in his role as her father, who was, by then, more than 20 years gone. “While he was doing the movie, I couldn’t be around him that much,” Lynn told Billboard. “I couldn’t sit down beside him – [he] reminded me so much of my daddy. I just wanted to hang on to him.”
Lynn and Doolittle were much involved in the filming of “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Spacek shadowed Lynn for a year, joining her as she toured and living at her home in order to immerse herself in Lynn’s mannerisms, the sound of her voice, her facial expressions as she spoke. And some of the movie was filmed at the Lynn home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee as the couple looked on. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the story was later adapted into a Broadway musical, starring Zooey Deschanel as Lynn.
Later career
Though the autobiographical film brought Lynn’s life story to a widespread audience, it didn’t represent a new height for her career. Instead, she held steady in the early 1980s, with songs that charted but didn’t reach the No. 1 spot. In the late ‘80s and through the ‘90s, Lynn slowed down, recording fewer albums and touring less as Doolittle’s health began to fail and she wanted to spend time caring for him. Yet there were later-career high points still to come for Lynn.
One was a collaboration, the 1993 album “Honky Tonk Angels,” recorded with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette (1942–1998). It included the single “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which had also been recorded by Lynn’s sister, Crystal Gayle, earlier in the same year. Lynn’s 2000 album “Still Country” was her first solo release since the ‘80s, and its single “Country in My Genes” made her the first female country singer to chart singles in five decades.
In 2004, Lynn made an unusual comeback that opened her music to a new audience: She recorded the album “Van Lear Rose” with Jack White of the White Stripes as her producer, guitarist, and backup singer. White had sought her out, interested in working with her, and the two became fast friends as they recorded together. The release received widespread critical acclaim and was her biggest crossover album yet, reaching a mainstream audience as well as a country one, and finding new young fans who came to the album for White and found themselves falling in love with Lynn.
Lynn released another collaborative album in 2016 as she approached her 84th birthday, “Full Circle,” in which she worked with Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello. It was another successful crossover, her first album to crack the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 200. She continued recording all her life, releasing her most recent album, “Still Woman Enough,” in 2021.
What fans loved about Lynn
Performing and touring were crucial to Lynn’s career, and she offered respect and attention to her fans. She stayed onstage after her shows, often for hours, signing autographs for anyone who asked. She told Time in 2016, “I would sit sometimes three to four hours after a show and sign every autograph till the last one left. About three years ago I just finally quit because it was getting a little hard. When I get through the show, it’s late. They still write [fan mail] because I write them back.”
Along with her willingness to sign autographs, Lynn became known for the elaborate gowns she wore onstage. She told Time that the signature look got its start early in her career: “I was making my own dresses because at first I didn’t have a lot of money to buy material with. I’d get two yards of material and make little short dresses down to my knees, and I’d hang fringe all over the dresses.” They became more opulent over the years, as she told AL.com: “The only thing I hate about them, they’re so heavy. They have rhinestones on the top of them, and on the bottom of them. They probably weigh 10 pounds. If they feel too heavy, I’ll sit down.”
Today, many of the gowns are on display at her Coal Miners Daughter Museum, located at the Loretta Lynn Ranch in Hurricane Mills. The Lynn home in Tennessee became a tourist attraction not long after the family moved there in 1966, as they discovered how interested fans were in visiting – even camping out on the grounds. The couple found they could turn a profit by charging for the visits, and the fan attractions grew over the years to include a number of museums, tours, gift shops, and outdoor activities.
Honors and awards
As the fans loved Lynn, so did the critics, and she was much honored over the years. She won armfuls of Grammy Awards, Country Music Association Awards, American Music Awards, and more, making her the record holder of most awards won by a woman in country music. In 1977, she became the first female country star to be included in Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, and in 1988, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
President Barack Obama made the following remarks as he presented her with the Medal of Freedom: “Loretta Lynn was 19 the first time she won big at the local fair. Her canned vegetables brought home 17 blue ribbons and made her canner of the year. Now that’s impressive! For a girl from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, that was fame. Fortunately for us, she decided to try her hand at other things than canning. Her first guitar cost $17, and with it this coal miner’s daughter gave voice to a generation, singing what no one wanted to talk about and saying what no one wanted to think about. Now, over 50 years after she cut her first record and canned her first vegetables, Loretta Lynn still reigns as the rule-breaking, record setting Queen of Country Music.”
Lynn on her long-lasting career
“Working keeps you young. I ain’t ever gonna stop. And when I do, it’s gonna be right on stage. That’ll be it.” – from a 2007 interview with Esquire
Full obituary: The New York Times
