Loretta Lynn
A groundbreaking and often controversial artist
Photographer Carol M. Highsmith, creator of the photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress, shown as Carol McKinney at age 4 with her sister Sara at her grandmother's farm in Madison, North Carolina. United States Madison North Carolina, ca. 1949. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2011634798/.
This edition of In Memoriam will be unusual in that it will be dedicated to someone: my mother. My mother has long loved country music, and I’ve often suspected it was in large part due to our family’s somewhat rural origins. Much of my maternal line lived and died not far from the Appalachia that nurtured and foster much of classic country music. These were the places where most people worked in coal mines or at steel plants and lived the kinds of lives memorialized in classic country music. I think my mother’s upbringing allowed her to understand Lynn’s music in a way people not from these places have to work to really hear what Lynn was singing about. And for this reason, at least in significant part, I cannot think of a country music artist that I associate more with my mother than Loretta Lynn.
As you may have read, this titan of U.S. country music passed away at the age of 90 and with her much of an era in that genre. And with all the years that have passed, the groundbreaking nature of Lynn’s career has been somewhat forgotten.
Loretta Webb was born during the Great Depression in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in a house without electricity or indoor plumbing, the second of eight children. Incidentally, the place where Loretta was born was near the coal mining company town of Van Lear but did not have a name until Loretta gave it one in her signature song “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Lynn’s father was indeed a coal miner like many of the men in the area, and of him, she sang:
We were poor but we had love
That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of
He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar
Of course, the worldwide 1930’s economic crash hit the U.S. hard with unemployment peaking at nearly 25% in 1933, but Appalachia suffered more than almost any other region. There are estimates that unemployment rose as high as 80% in some Appalachian counties as the coal, timber, and steel industries experienced severe downturns in concert with the broader economy.
Nonetheless, as alluded to in the quote from Coal Miner’s Daughter, she had a happy childhood. Lynn was born into a musical family as her father played the banjo and her mother the guitar. And, both sang the songs of the Carter Family. Her mother taught Lynn and her siblings rural storytelling, and Lynn once claimed “I was singing when I was born, I think.”
She added:
Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.’
In her mid-teens, at a pie social, Lynn met Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, the man who would become her husband and her manager. Oliver Lynn had been a coal miner and a moonshine runner. Even though Lynn always said and believed she was 13 when she married her husband, in 2012, the Associated Press obtained her birth certificate, which recorded her birth in 1932 and not 1934 as commonly believed. Hence she was 15 when she married.
After all, in her famous autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn said she married at 13 and had four children by 18. When Lynn’s publicist was asked about the revelation, she declined to make a specific response and instead remarked Lynn had told her publicist that “[i]f anyone asks how old I am, tell them it’s none of their business!” Nonetheless, it was common for some birth dates to either not be recorded or recorded late as pedigree information like dates of birth mattered less before the Second World War.
In the 1950’s, Doolittle and Loretta moved far from Kentucky to Washington state, and she was the mother of four children when she started her career. Reportedly, after her husband heard her singing in the kitchen, he urged her to start singing professionally, and Lynn wrote her first song “in 20 minutes on a $17 guitar:” “I'm a Honky Tonk Girl” Her husband had bought her the guitar for her 18th birthday. Incessant touring and more songwriting and recording followed.
By the early 1960’s, Lynn was in the vanguard of female country artists who wrote their own material. With typical candor, Lynn once said “I wasn’t the first woman in country music.” She added that “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about.”
One music historian claimed Lynn’s songs “spoke for working-class women in a way no ardent feminist could ever do.” Another said “[h]er songs were delivered from a distinctly female point of view, and that had not been done before, not the way she did it.” He added “[w]riting about women as they really lived — that was a breakthrough.”
Of her music, Lynn said “[i]t was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too.” She added that “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women…[a]nd the men loved it, too.”
Moreover, Lynn wrote fearlessly about all sorts of taboo subjects: spousal abuse, birth control, losing one’s virginity, and divorced women. Understandably, the country music industry was not inclined to support and promote controversial material. Consequently, a number of Lynn’s songs were banned on some country radio stations. Moreover, it has been claimed that Lynn’s songs were banned more times than all her male contemporaries combined:
Nonetheless, Lynn seemed delighted whenever one of her songs was banned. In 1987, she said:
I’ve had eight of my songs banned, and all eight went to No. 1! As soon as I heard one of my songs got banned, I knew it would go to the top of the charts!
Just to mention one of these banned songs, her 1975 hit “The Pill” about birth control was actually been recorded in 1972 but the executives at her record company were reportedly not keen on releasing a song on such a controversial subject. After all, Roe v. Wade, the case legalizing abortion in the U.S., had been decided in 1973. But, the song was eventually released, and Lynn had another #1 hit. But on the way to commercial success, Lynn encountered a few bumps as more than 60 radio stations banned the song but sales were strong on word of mouth recommendations.
Lynn summarized the song this way:
It’s just a wife arguin’ with her husband. The wife is sayin’, ‘You’ve kept me barefoot and pregnant all these years while you’ve been slippin’ around. Now you straighten out or I’ll start, now that I have the pill.’
Other Passings
This World War II ace finally came down to Earth.
A trailblazer who brought more gender equity to North American sports.
This songbird has flown away.
The man that coached “Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Maria Sharapova, Marcelo Rios and Boris Becker” has passed away.
You can thank him for much of the consumer protection regime in the United States.
He led the People’s Republic of China into global prominence, and he was the only Chinese official imprisoned after Tiananmen Square.
Perhaps the last member of Hawaii’s royalty has died.
This American reporter was arrested by the Soviets for shedding light on the plight of Jews in the USSR.
What a woman!! So interesting, thanks for sharing. I will definitely be looking up her music xx