Country music pioneer Loretta Lynn has passed away at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. In a statement her family and her manager confirmed that she died in her sleep on October 4th, 2022 at the age of 90. She was known the world over for her strong voice and her stellar songwriting skills, two facets that made her a country music legend. Even into her final years she was still recording and performing live, something many musicians find hard to do. She only stopped touring a few years before her death due to suffering a stroke followed by a broken hip and was still occasionally performing live up until a year before she passed away.
Her life was far from an easy one as she grew up with a number of struggles, then had a heap of them well into her adulthood. It was these everyday problems, both big and small, that she threaded through her music and which made her songs so relatable to the rest of us.
She was born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932. Like many breadwinners in the area her father was a coal miner, which meant that her family rarely any money to spare for luxuries. She wrote about this extensively in her book, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and sung about it in the song of the same name.
The lyrics recall her family living in a cabin, her father not only working as a miner, but also farming during the day and selling a hog on the side to afford new shoes for the kids when the weather turned cold. As she put it, “Daddy always managed to get the money from somewhere.” The 1980 film (also titled Coal Miner’s Daughter) chronicled the hardships of her family life and became an instant classic.
Growing up in the South during the Great Depression in a family with 8 kids was no easy task, and it’s not surprising that she married young because of that. She was just a young teen when she married Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn (also called “Mooney”). The couple moved to Washington State so Doolittle could work logging trees. She already had several children with “Doo” by the time he convinced her to take to the stage and share her talents with the world.
She famously got her start songwriting by using a $17 guitar purchased from a Sears catalog. But, her humble beginnings didn’t prevent her from belting out those catchy tunes night after night. Some of the catchiest were in fact about her troubled marriage to Doo who was also her manager from the start.
He was known to be a hard drinking man and had become violent with her on more than one occasion. He was also unfaithful to her many times over the years. But, she stayed with him and even defended their love fiercely. This was in part because she did love him, in part because he had helped to make her star, and in part because of the 6 children they had together.
Doo died in 1996 after suffering from diabetes, and it was only after his death that she talked openly about how hard it had been to stay married to him. But, by some accounts their marriage also settled down in Doo’s later years.
Lynn’s upbringing in poverty was not completely dissimilar to Patsy Cline, a new country star when the two met. Cline was beginning to make a name for herself when her song “I Fall to Pieces” was released in 1961. That same year Lynn covered the song and Cline heard it on the radio while she was recovering from a near-fatal car accident. She insisted on meeting Lynn after that and the two became very fast friends, being the same age, both from the South, and both in the country music industry.