Loretta Lynn

1932–2022 · 90 years

She wrote what women were actually living, and radio banned eight songs

Portrait of Loretta Lynn — Les Leverett — 1965 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Butcher Hollow was a cluster of houses up a creek in Johnson County, Kentucky, and Ted Webb worked the mines and farmed to feed eight children. Loretta was the second. On January 10, 1948, at 15, she married Oliver Lynn, a 21-year-old she had met a month earlier at a pie social, and she told the story for decades as 13 until a 2012 review of the records corrected it. They left for a logging town in Washington state while she was seven months pregnant. By her early twenties she had four children. Her husband bought her a 17-dollar Sears guitar and talked her onto a stage at the local Grange hall, telling anyone who listened that his wife could outsing everybody but Kitty Wells.

She wrote her own material, which almost no woman in Nashville did, and she wrote about what women were actually living: the husband who came home drunk, the woman circling him, the hollow she came out of. Don't Come Home A-Drinkin'. Fist City. You Ain't Woman Enough. Coal Miner's Daughter. Then The Pill in 1975, a song about oral contraception that many country stations refused to play and that rural doctors told her had done more for women in the hills than all the government programs put together. She counted eight banned songs and said the bans sold records.

She rejected the word feminist. In her 1976 memoir she wrote that she was no big fan of women's liberation, though maybe it would help women stand up for the respect they were due, and that upper-class feminism ignored working-class women. She was also writing the most direct commercial songs about women's autonomy in American popular music. The marriage lasted 48 years, until Doolittle died in 1996. She said plainly that he drank, that he cheated on her regularly, that he once left while she was giving birth, and that he never hit her once without her hitting him back twice. She put it in the songs. One of the twins born in 1964 is named for Patsy Cline, who had died in 1963. Exhaustion put her in the hospital repeatedly and she went back out on the road.

The 1976 autobiography, written with sportswriter George Vecsey, sat on the bestseller list and gave her a title that has followed her since. The 1980 film of it won Sissy Spacek the Academy Award for Best Actress and moved Lynn out of country radio and into general American memory. At 72 she made Van Lear Rose with Jack White of the White Stripes, wrote or co-wrote every song on it, and picked up two Grammys and an audience that had not been born when she started. Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She died in her sleep at her Hurricane Mills ranch on October 4, 2022, at 90, and was buried there beside Doolittle.

Lifespan

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Loretta Lynn's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man) song
Made her the first woman in country music to write her own No. 1 hit 1966
Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind) song
The album of the same name was the first by a woman in country music certified gold 1967
Fist City song
Her third No. 1 country single 1968
Coal Miner's Daughter song
NPR later listed it among the 100 most significant songs of the 20th century 1970
The Pill song
Banned by many country stations. She said eight of her songs were banned in all 1975
Van Lear Rose album
Produced by Jack White. Every song written or co-written by Lynn, at 72. Two Grammys 2004

Life in brief

with age at each point

April 14, 1932 aged 0 Born in a cabin at Butcher Hollow, Kentucky Second of the eight children of Ted Webb, a coal miner and subsistence farmer.
January 10, 1948 aged 15 Marries Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn at 15 She told it as 13 for decades. Records reviewed by the Associated Press in 2012 put her age at 15.
February 2, 1960 aged 27 Signs her first recording contract, with Zero Records She and her husband mailed copies of I'm a Honky Tonk Girl to country stations. It reached No. 14.
September 25, 1962 aged 30 Joins the Grand Ole Opry
1966 aged ~34 Writes and records You Ain't Woman Enough The first No. 1 country hit written by the woman singing it.
1972 aged ~40 First woman named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association
1975 aged ~43 Releases The Pill and country radio refuses it Rural doctors told her the song did more for women in the hills than the government programs.
March 5, 1980 aged 47 Coal Miner's Daughter opens in Nashville Sissy Spacek won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing her.
October 4, 2022 aged 90 Dies in her sleep at her Hurricane Mills ranch Buried on the ranch three days later, beside her husband.