Loretta Lynn, the country music icon who brought unparalleled candor about the domestic realities of working-class women to country songwriting — and taught those who came after her to speak their minds, too — died today at her home in Tennessee. She was 90 years old.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” her family said in a statement.
Born Loretta Webb, Lynn was barely a teenager when she started a family of her own with a 21-year-old former soldier, Oliver Lynn, better known as “Mooney” or “Doolittle.” They wasted no time having the first four of their six children, and migrated to Washington state. It was there that her husband heard her bedtime lullabies and pushed her to start performing publicly.
One of the biggest songs of Loretta Lynn’s career, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” proudly recounted her hardscrabble background. And Lynn never tired of telling stories of her upbringing in a remote coal mining community in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky.
In a 2000 NPR interview, she recalled how her parents, Melvin and Clara Webb, did whatever it took to feed their eight children, even if it meant accepting a relative’s gift of a stolen chicken.
“There was many times we went to bed hungry and wake up in the middle of the night 3 o’clock in the morning and smell chicken cooking,” she recalled. “Mommy get us up and let us eat and go back to bed.”
In a 2010 interview with WHYY’s Fresh Air, Loretta Lynn insisted she wouldn’t have done it otherwise.
“I wouldn’t get out in front of people. I was really bashful and I wouldn’t, I would have never sang in front of anybody.”
Once her husband started scrounging up paying gigs for her, Loretta taught herself to write songs, says country music historian and journalist Robert Oermann.
“She got a copy of Country Song Roundup,” he said. “This is a magazine that has country lyrics printed in it, along with stories about the stars. She would read the country lyrics in the magazine, and she’d go, ‘Well that’s nothing. I can do that.’ And she could, and had been.”
Lynn and her husband drove around to radio stations. She would introduce herself to the deejays and try to charm them into spinning her record.
The couple’s efforts had begun to get her noticed when they landed in Nashville in 1960. Artists like Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, who became Lynn’s mentor, were having a lot of success with a lush, pop-sweetened production style known as the Nashville Sound. Lynn worked with Cline’s producer, Owen Bradley, but hung onto her unsoftened twang.
Country songs had often portrayed hardship from male perspectives, but Lynn wasn’t afraid to spell out the indignities she endured in her marriage, or the double standards she saw other women facing when it came to divorce, pregnancy and birth control.
Lynn found that Nashville wasn’t accustomed to that kind of frankness.
“I’ll tell ya, when I come to Nashville, I didn’t really know that people did not say what they thought. I’ve always been a person to say what I think.”
Fellow eastern Kentucky songwriter Angaleena Presley was raised on her mother’s Loretta Lynn records, and recognizes what they must have meant to women of earlier generations.
“I’m positive that there probably were many, many women in that time, especially in the country, who thought I’m not really allowed to say anything if my husband wants to drink. He works all day. He deserves to drink at night and come home and do what he wants. And I’ll clean the house and raise the kids,” Presley said. “And she said, ‘Nope. It’s not OK, and it’s OK for you to say it’s not OK.’
“But you know, I feel like it contributed a lot to the feminist movement, especially in rural America. Because I feel like she was the voice; even if she never spoke out actively as a feminist, her songs certainly did.”
Fifty-one of those songs became top 10 country hits on the Billboard charts. And in 1972, Loretta Lynn was the first woman named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association.
“It is not enough to say today that Country Music has lost Loretta Lynn, but rather the world has lost a true music legend,” Sarah Trahern, the CMA’s chief executive, said in a prepared statement. “As a trailblazing songwriter, she bravely wrote about socially and culturally relevant topics that came to define a generation.”
Her relationship with Doolittle was complicated, but they remained married until his death in 1996. And Loretta made sure her fans knew that her long-lasting musical partnership with Conway Twitty was all-business.
Lynn continued performing and recording into the new millennium, attracting younger audiences through her collaboration with rocker Jack White. But it was essential to Lynn’s enduring appeal that she never lost touch with her identity as a simultaneously modern and down-to-earth country woman.
Journalist Robert Oermann saw her communicate that to crowds throughout her career.
“This idea that I might be up here on stage singing this song, but I’m not better than you. I am you,” he said. “And that’s kind of the message. That kind of humility is a really powerful and good thing.”
And it always informed her songwriting.
“I like real life, because that’s what we’re doing today,” Lynn said. “And I think that’s why people bought my records, because they’re living in this world. And so am I. So I see what’s going on, and I grab it.”
Loretta Lynn’s gutsiness comes through just as clearly today in the music she left behind.
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