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"Yeah, I'm proud to be a coal miner's daughter," Loretta Lynn announced to the world in her 1971 song that also became the title of her 1976 autobiography and 1980 biopic. "The work we done was hard, at night we'd sleep 'cause we were tired, I never thought of ever leaving Butcher Holler," she sang proudly.
Lynn, who died last week at her ranch in Tennessee at the age of 90, left Butcher Hollow, the real name of her hometown, but Butcher Hollow never left her.
She was born Loretta Webb in the small Kentucky mining town in 1932, one of eight children. Her family had little money, but she had fond memories of home, especially her father. "Even though he died before I got started singing, I had almost 14 years of Daddy giving me love and security," Lynn wrote. "I think Daddy's the main reason I always had respect for myself when times got rough—I knew my Daddy loved me."
She spoke fondly of the people she grew up with in her autobiography. "Holler people are just different than anybody else. They live up high in the hills, one day at a time," she wrote. "There probably are a few who don't know who the president is, and there have been times when they were better off that way."
Many artists try to escape their roots, but Lynn forever embraced hers. "They're really beautiful people in their own way," she said about the people of Butcher Hollow. "Everybody else is worrying about the energy crisis and talking about getting back to the simple things. My people are already there. If we run out of energy, my relatives know how to patch their houses and grow their gardens, so they're gonna have the last laugh on everybody."
The first time she remembered ever seeing a toilet was in a bus station in Paintsville, a nearby town of 4,000. "When I sat down on the seat, the toilet flushed automatically," she recalled. "I got so scared I was gonna get flushed down, I ran outta there and waited until we found a good old outhouse."
Growing up, she sang in church and at home, but no one, not even Lynn herself, could have imagined the life she'd eventually live. She married the love of her life, Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, whom she called "Doo," when she was 15 and gave birth to their first child the same year. "When I got married, I didn't even know what pregnant meant," Lynn told NPR in 2010. She would learn fast, having three more children in her first four years of marriage. They'd later add a set of twins to the family.
After her husband lost his job in the mines, the couple moved 3,000 miles from home, to Washington state and a logging town called Custer. Music was the furthest thing from Lynn's mind. "I took care of a farmhouse, cleaned and cooked for 36 ranch hands before I started singing," she said. "Life was hard."
Lynn pursued a music career at the insistence of her husband. He'd heard her humming tunes that soothed their babies and told his bride she sounded better than many of the women singing country songs on the radio. He bought her a $17 Harmony guitar and set up her first gig at a local tavern.
Her husband also pushed Lynn to write her own songs. When asked how she came up with her first hit song, 1960's "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl," she had a simple answer. "I listened to a bunch of people, you know, their songs and stuff, and I figured, If they can write, I can too. So I said, Hey, I'm going to tell a story. And that's what I did."
Lynn made her mark on Nashville precisely because she had stories to tell. And she told them for the next 50 years in catchy, mercurial three-minute morality plays that resonated with fans across America, so many of whom saw their struggles and joys—their lives—in her songs.
The success of "Honky Tonk Girl" landed Lynn on the greatest stage in country music, Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, and a record deal with Decca. Not long after, Lynn would become friends with another rising star on the Nashville scene, Patsy Cline. "She taught me a lot," Lynn said. "She told me to get out of the jeans. I would wear them until we get to the radio station. Then I'd get in the backseat and put on my dress. Then I'd take the dress off and go back into my jeans and wait till the next radio station, and then I'd go back into my dress again.
Cline also taught her to stand up to her husband, which she'd do for the rest of their marriage. "After I met Patsy, life got better because I fought back," Lynn told Nashville Scene. "Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn't nothin' I could do. Later on, I started speakin' my mind when things weren't right."
One of those songs was her 1966 hit "Don't Come Home A Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)." In classic Lynn form, she explained how the song came to be to NPR's Terri Gross.
Gross: Were you thinking of [Boo] when you wrote this song?
Lynn: Oh, yeah.
Gross: Would he come home after drinking like that?
Lynn: Well, sure. If a man drinks, he's going to come home drinking. He liked to drink.
Gross: Was this song intended to send him a message?
Lynn: Not really. I probably told him many times. I didn't have to sing about it.
Some of her hit songs challenged conventional narratives of the genre. But Lynn wasn't writing to blaze trails: She was writing about what she was living. "Lynn's songs spoke for working-class women in a way no ardent feminist could ever do," music historian Bill Malone wrote.
Lynn's sixth chart-topping single, "Rated 'X,'" tackled the stigma that divorced women faced leaving their husbands. As always, Lynn pulled things off with a mix of mountain wit and candor:
The women all look at you like you're bad and the men all hope you are
But if you go too far you're gonna wear the scar of a woman rated X.
Her songs "The Pill" and "One's on the Way" were songs from her heart: Both were about pregnancy. "I sure didn't like it when I got pregnant a few times, you know?" she told NPR. "Back when I was having all the kids, we didn't have birth control pills. Or if they did, I didn't know anything about them."
"Fist City" was a revenge song—and fan favorite—about a woman in town trying to steal Lynn's husband. "There was a gal that tried to take Doo from me," Lynn explained. Asked if she threatened the woman, Lynn laughed. "I did, and with more than a song. And not in rhyme. It didn't rhyme at all."
In 1969, Lynn performed with Conway Twitty at an international country music festival in London. The two would go on to record some of the best-selling duets in country music history, including their 1972 Grammy-winning "After the Fire Is Gone."
A big part of Lynn's success was built around her commitment to constant touring, a byproduct of her Appalachian work ethic. "If you're gonna record, you gotta be out there with the people who buy your records," she would say. She regularly played 125 plus shows a year, traveling 150,000 miles a year in her custom tour bus.
Lynn would experience even greater national exposure when her autobiography, Coal Miner's Daughter, was turned into a movie with Sissy Spacek playing Lynn and Tommy Lee Jones as Boo. Spacek's performance won her the best actress Oscar in 1981.
Lynn was also an astute businesswoman. She owned large amounts of real estate in her hometown of Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, where she operated a ranch that has a replica of the Butcher Hollow cabin she grew up in.
Her life changed dramatically when her husband of 50 years died in 1996. And not for the better, according to Lynn. "I miss him so much. He always kept me moving, and he'd always tell me how good I was. And that always helped a lot," she said. "If it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't have been singing, period, because he thought I could sing. And he put me to work."
It was a complicated relationship, one affected by abuse, alcoholism and infidelity. "We fought one day, and we'd love the next. So that, to me, that's a good relationship. If you can't fight and tell each other what you think, your relationship ain't much anyway." Her late husband, Lynn admitted, was in almost every song she wrote. "If I write a song, he's in there somewhere."
Lynn lived a life filled with joys and sorrows, victories and losses. Among the losses were her oldest child, Betty Sue (emphysema), in 2013 and her son Jack (accidental drowning) in 1984. She also lost three children to miscarriages.
Her artistic triumphs span seven decades and are almost too many to count. Lynn racked up 16 No. 1 hits on Billboard's country singles chart and 51 top 10's. She also won three Grammys, including best album, in 2004 for her collaboration with Jack White called Van Lear Rose, which introduced her to a new generation of fans. Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008, and she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But Lynn's most cherished award, the one she was most proud of, was being named the first female entertainer of the year in the Country Music Awards. She would win that award two more times.
In early 2021, at the age of 89, she recorded her 50th album, Still Woman Enough. The lyrics to the title song, which she sang with Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire, captured the essence of her life and career:
I'm still woman enough, still got what it takes inside
I know how to love, lose and survive
Ain't much I ain't seen, I ain't tried
I've been knocked down, but never out of the fight
I'm strong, but I'm tender
Wise, but I'm tough
And let me tell you when it comes to love
I'm still woman enough.
"I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything," she told The New York Times in 2016. "But when you hear the song, you just grin." Most of her music was set to traditional country arrangements that matched Lynn's feisty backwoods drawl. The man who produced most of her songs, Owen Bradley, called her "the female Hank Williams."
"I'm proud I've got my own ideas, but I ain't no better than nobody else," Lynn said in a book about the female legends of country music. "I've often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that's the reason. I think I reach people because I'm with 'em, not apart from 'em."
On the Sunday before she died, Lynn shared a quote from the Bible—John 3:20-12—on Facebook. "Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God." It would be the last post she'd ever write.
Lynn celebrated her 90th birthday in April 2022 and received well-wishes from fellow musicians worldwide. "To us, you're timeless and ageless and always will be," said country music star Tim McGraw and his wife, Faith Hill.
Millions upon millions of adoring fans from every walk of life who've ever known heartbreak and trouble—and overcome both—most certainly agree.
