NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose candid songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia lifted her out of poverty and made her a country music mainstay , is dead. She was 90 years old.
In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4, in her sleep at home on her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the family said in a statement. They asked for confidentiality during their mourning and said a memorial would be announced later.
Lynn already had four children before launching her career in the early 1960s, and her songs reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky background.
As a songwriter, she shaped the persona of a tough, defiant woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer fearlessly wrote about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got into trouble with radio programmers over material including even rock artists have turned away.
Her biggest hits were released in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, “You Ain’t Woman Enough”, “The Pill”, “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind ), “”Rated X” and “You Look at the Country”. She was known for appearing in wide, long dresses with elaborate embroidery or rhinestones, many of which were created by her longtime personal assistant and designer Tim Cobb.
His honesty and unique place in country music have been rewarded. She was the first woman to be named Artist of the Year at both of the genre’s major award ceremonies, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear too,” Lynn told the AP. in 2016. “I wasn’t writing for men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it too.
In 1969 she published her autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, which helped her reach her widest audience to date.
“We was poor but we had love / That’s the only thing daddy made sure of / He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s money,” she sang.
“Coal Miner’s Daughter”, also the title of his 1976 book, was made into a 1980 film of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Oscar, and the film was also nominated for Best Picture.
Long after her commercial heyday, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” on a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.
Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she claimed her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the mining town of Van Lear in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. However, there really wasn’t a Butcher Holler. She later told a reporter that she came up with the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families who lived there.
Her dad played the banjo, her mom played the guitar, and she grew up on Carter family songs.
“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Dad used to go out on the porch where I was singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He said, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. Everywhere in that scream, people can hear you. And I said, ‘Dad, what difference does it make? These are all my cousins.’
She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she married Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later uncovered state records. it showed that she was 15 years old. Tommy Lee Jones played Mooney Lynn in the biopic.
Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle”, urged her to sing professionally and helped promote her early career. With his help, she secured a recording contract with Decca Records, later MCA, and performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Lynn wrote her first hit single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl”, released in 1960.
She also teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of country music’s most popular duos with Grammy-winning hits like “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone.” Their duets, and his singles, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.
The Academy of Country Music selected her as the Artist of the Decade of the 1970s and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988.
In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens to fight with her fists if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, girl, fire my man/If you don’t want don’t go to Fist City. This strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill”, a song about sex and birth control, Lynn writes that she is tired of being locked up home to take care of babies: “Wellness is getting easy now/Since I’m on the pill,” she sang.
She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she established a ranch with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known to wear are there too.
Her younger sister, Crystal Gayle, is also a popular Grammy-winning country singer, scoring crossover hits with songs like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “Half the Way.”
Lynn knew her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was simply writing the truth that so many rural women like her have experienced.
“I could see that other women were going through the same thing, because I worked in the clubs. I wasn’t the only one living this life and I’m not the only one living today what I ‘write,” she told the AP in 1995.
Even in her later years, Lynn never seemed to stop writing, scoring a multi-album deal in 2014 with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017, she suffered a stroke which forced her to postpone her shows.
She and her husband were married almost 50 years before his death in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, then the twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
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