Loretta Lynn, coal miner’s daughter, dies
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Loretta Lynn, who rose from a hardscrabble upbringing to become the most culturally significant female singer-songwriter in country music history, died Tuesday at age 90.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, Oct. 4, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” her family said in a statement to The Tennessean.
Many of Lynn’s songs are filled with specifics of her wholly unique life, yet they had a universal appeal. She wrote about intimate matters — from her difficult, wearying childhood to fights with her husband — yet managed to strike a collective nerve. And, without ever mentioning politics or women’s liberation, her songs helped to change longheld notions about gender roles. “Rated ‘X’” and “Don’t Come Home A’drinkin (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” were personal pleas — not political treatises — that sought an end to double standards.
Lynn did all this at a time when women were most often the voices through which men’s words and melodies were heard. She was Nashville’s first prominent woman to write and record her own material, and was one of the first female music stars to generate her own hits.
“She is the single most important female singer-songwriter of the 20th century,” said rock performer Jack White, who produced Lynn’s Grammywinning “Van Lear Rose” album (2004).
When she was set to receive her Kennedy Center Honor, Lynn told The Tennessean that she wasn’t sure why people found her culture-shaking songs so remarkable.
“Cultural contributions? What’s that?” she asked. “I was just sayin’ it like I was livin’ it. People’d go around that, but I went right through the middle.”
When Loretta Lynn was born, there was no such thing as Butcher Holler.
“The whole thing is really Webb Holler,” she said in a 2003 interview. “The Webbs owned the holler, and the Webbs started marrying into the Butchers. I thought the syllable come out better saying ‘Butcher’ than saying ‘Webb,’ so I made it Butcher Holler. They say ‘Butcher’ since that song.”
Whatever its name, the holler was not something many people concerned themselves with before Lynn’s ascendance into country music royalty. It wasn’t even on most maps. For Lynn, it was a place of hardship, poverty and danger. She lived in a cabin near Van Lear, Kentucky, with no plumbing or electricity. In the winter, the water that father Ted Webb would draw from the well at night would freeze solid by morning, and snow seeped through cracks in the exterior.
In her 1970 smash hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn told the story of her upbringing. When an autobiography and a movie were released, Butcher Holler became a part of the story of country music. Visitors streamed to the home. The cabin was myth that could be touched.
In later years, Lynn returned to the cabin and marveled.
“I stood out there on that porch and looked out and thought, ‘How in the devil did I ever get out of here?’” she said.
Lynn’s father worked the night shift at the Consolidated Number Five mine, while her mother tended to the kids (Lynn was the second of Ted and Clara Webb’s eight children) and read books by a kerosene lamp until he came home. In her first autobiography, Lynn looked back on her father’s work in the Consolidated Number Five mine as something heroic.
“He kept his family alive by breaking his own body down,” she wrote.
Though some of Lynn’s relatives played music, and the family listened to the “Grand Ole Opry” on Saturday nights, she never saw singing as a way out of the hills.
“I never thought of ever leaving Butcher Holler,” she sang in “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” She eventually left for love, not music, though it was her music that ultimately transformed her childhood home into a legendary spot. That doesn’t mean everyone back in the holler was happy with her.
“The Butchers got mad because I used their name and they wanted me to put a concrete highway up through there,” she said. “I sent ’em a letter and said, ‘I waded up to my knees when I left there, and so can you.’ ”
Lynn’s was an unprecedented story that will be retold but not repeated.
“God gives you life, and you do with it what you want to,” she told The Tennessean. “If you turn out bad, that’s up to you. If you turn out good, that’s up to you, also. But still, from the time I was borned, I think he probably held my hand, or held me in his arms. Or else I’d have never made it.”