Born: April 14, 1932
Died: October 4th, 2022
Loretta Lynn, the country singer whose vivid songs and inspiring life story made her one of the most beloved American musical performers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90.
Her family said in a statement that she died in her sleep at her ranch, which had turned the town of Hurricane Mills, about 70 miles west of Nashville, into a tourist destination.
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Lynn built her stardom not only on her music but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler). She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanising occasional bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her 1976 autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, a bestseller and the grist for an Oscar-winning film adaptation of the same name.
Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta, you just turn on the mike, stand back and hold on.”
Her songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters. Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: “She’s got everything it takes/To take everything you’ve got,” she sang in “Everything It Takes,” one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.
Lynn got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. She nevertheless became a voice for ordinary women, recording three-minute morality plays in the 1960s and ‘70s — many written by her, some written by others — that spoke to the changing mores of women throughout America.
She drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr, who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney, the last of these nicknames a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey.
Lynn’s 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” was based on a confrontation she had with one of her husband’s mistresses; her 1968 single “Fist City” was born of a similar incident. The inspiration for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” in 1966, were those times when Oliver Lynn, his libido roused after a night out, would stumble home expecting to satisfy it.
“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90% of the time every line in there was for him,” Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.” The marriage lasted 48 years, until Oliver Lynn died of congestive heart failure in 1996.
Lynn drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr, who was also known as Mooney, a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey
His drinking and womanising notwithstanding, he was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement, certainly early in their marriage, after they moved from Kentucky to Custer, Washington, in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she sang while doing chores at home, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine that included the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits.
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Oliver Lynn went on to manage his wife’s career, insisting that she perform in honky-tonks and at radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical gifts. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in the early 1960s, and Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.
“After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”
Lynn’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first stirrings of the modern women’s movement. She rejected the feminist tag in interviews, but many of her songs, including the 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” were fiery expressions of female resolve.
Lynn’s sexual politics had already taken an emphatic turn with “The Pill” (1975), a riotous celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and TD Bayless.
Her most confrontational recordings of the 1970s, in fact, corresponded with her greatest popularity. In 1972, she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association.
Lynn’s mother Clara Marie, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling
Loretta Webb was born in a cabin in Butcher Hollow on April 14, 1932, the second of eight children. Her parents, Melvin Theodore Webb and Clara Marie (Ramey) Webb, liked to decorate the cabin walls with magazine photos of movie stars. Loretta was named after Loretta Young.
In “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1976), her memoir written with George Vecsey , Lynn noted that her mother, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, had taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling. Lynn and her brothers and sisters often sang in church and at other social gatherings. Three of her siblings also pursued careers in music, notably Brenda Gail, who under the name Crystal Gayle became a star in her own right in the late 1970s with crossover hits like “Talking in Your Sleep” and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”.
Lynn quit singing in public when she married in 1948. Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington the next year, when Lynn, at 16, gave birth to Betty Sue, the first of the couple’s six children.
It was a decade before Lynn performed again. Not long after she did, though, she appeared on a Tacoma, Washington TV talent show hosted by Buck Owens and attracted the attention of Norm Burley, an executive with Zero Records, a small label based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She signed with the company and recorded four original songs for it in 1960.
On the strength of the airplay received by the single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”, the Lynns moved to Nashville, where Lynn began recording demos for the Wilburn Brothers, a popular country singing duo who became her music publishers and helped her obtain a deal with Decca Records. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry in September 1960. In 1962, “Success”, about the relationship between material wealth and happiness, became her first Top 10 single.
Over the next 28 years, Lynn placed 77 singles on the country charts. More than 50 of them reached the Top 10, and 16 reached number one, including “After the Fire Is Gone”, the first in a series of steamy hit duets she made with Conway Twitty. Virtually all of her recordings were steeped in traditional country arrangements suited to her perky backwoods drawl; most were produced by Owen Bradley, who likened her to “a female Hank Williams.”
Lynn wrote fewer songs as the 1970s progressed, but continued to tour and record. She also established her own booking agency, music publishing company and clothing line, as well as the tourist attraction Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, a 19th-century plantation house that she and her husband bought in the late 1960s. The Hurricane Mills complex includes campgrounds, a dude ranch, a motocross course, a music shed, a replica of the cabin where Lynn grew up, a simulated coal mine and museums.
The Academy of Country Music named Lynn its artist of the decade for the 1970s just as Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 1980 movie based on her autobiography, returned her Cinderella story to the forefront of the national consciousness. The film starred Sissy Spacek, who won an Academy Award, in the title role, and Tommy Lee Jones as Oliver Lynn.
Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.