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Loretta Lynn

Leading light of country music who broke barriers with songs about the real lives of women

LORETTA LYNN, who has died aged 90, was a serious contender, with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, for the much-prized accolade “the First Lady of Country Music”.

Brought up in rural Kentucky, Loretta Lynn emerged in the early 1960s as one of the first successful female country music vocalists in an industry hitherto dominated by men. Like a handful of other women in the genre like Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline, she enshrined professionalism, authentic songs, homespun values and no-nonsense attitudes.

While her sweet and yearning unadulterated country voice was much admired, Loretta Lynn also became an accomplished songwriter, with such hits as Coal Miner’s Daughter

(1970), You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man) in 1966 and, in 1967, Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind), an early espousal of feminism.

Her lyrics focused on blue-collar women’s issues (philandering husbands and scheming mistresses featured regularly) and she sang about repeated childbirth (One’s on the Way)

and the double standards that penalised women (Rated X).

In 1975 Loretta Lynn released the album Back to the Country, which included The Pill, considered to be probably the first significant social song about oral contraceptives. It was reckoned so controversial that her record label delayed its release for three years, and many country radio stations refused to play it.

Later she was reassured by numerous doctors and nurses that The Pill had done more to promote rural acceptance of birth control than any government efforts.

With the singer Conway Twitty, with whom she formed a successful duo, Loretta Lynn had five consecutive No 1 hits between 1971 and 1975. By then she was commanding $15,000 a night appearing in Las Vegas. As a soloist, she had more than 50 Top 10 country hits between 1962 and 1982, including 16 No 1s but, as the Telegraph

noted in 2015, her impact on country music went beyond her bold songwriting and chart success.

Her father was a coal miner and she remembered, aged seven, weeping when the family pig chewed the only dress she owned that had not been made from flour sacks. But for all her stereotypical country music background growing up in poverty in a one-room log cabin, as a performer and songwriter she was a genuine trailblazer, creating a variation of the country genre that became known as Americana.

She married her husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn when she was only 15. For many years it was claimed that she had wed at 13 (he was 21), but it was later established that in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976), the best-selling autobiography that in 1980 became an Academy Award-winning film starring Sissy Spacek, Loretta Lynn had shaved nearly three years off her age.

Even so, she was still very young and her marriage was tumultuous. She blamed her husband’s drinking for his violence (one night when Doo turned abusive over dinner, she poured an entire frying pan of hot creamed corn on his head) and she later admitted that as a child bride she was ignorant of the facts of life.

When the couple moved to Custer, a small town in Washington State, her husband worked as a bronco buster in the West Coast rodeo circuit and she supplemented their income by picking strawberries with migrant workers.

On their sixth wedding anniversary, in 1953, he bought her a $17 Harmony guitar. After years of hearing her serenade their six children, he became convinced that Loretta had genuine talent. In 1960, while leaning up against an old lavatory, she used the guitar to write her first song, I’m a Honky Tonk Girl, in 20 minutes.

The second child of eight, she was born Loretta Webb on April 14 1932 in Butcher Hollow, a hamlet outside Van Lear in Kentucky, and named after the actress Loretta Young by her mother, who papered the walls of their shack with pages from film magazines. As a child, Loretta walked several miles a day to and from Miller’s Creek school in Van Lear, where she met her future husband.

In 1960, having moved to Custer, she sang with a local band on a radio show, a booking that led to a season at a local concert venue which drew capacity audiences. She recorded I’m a Honky Tonk Girl in Vancouver and toured the country for three months promoting the song, which reached No 10 in the US country charts.

After a record-breaking run starring in The Grand Ole Opry, America’s most popular country music radio show, Loretta Lynn and her family settled in Nashville and she signed a lifetime contract with Decca records.

In 1966 she formed her own group, the Blue Kentuckians, and by the early 1970s was a multi-millionaire with a string of hit records, her own rodeo company, two talent agencies, three music publishing houses and a 1,450-acre ranch that incorporated the town of Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

During President George HW Bush’s inauguration gala in January 1989, Loretta Lynn, with her daughter Cissy, and her sisters Crystal Gayle and Peggy

Sue Wright, performed a medley of classic country songs, beginning with Loretta’s signature song Coal Miner’s Daughter.

“Don’t ever come in on me while I’m writing a song, because I’m not myself,” she told an interviewer in 2004. “I’m the person that I’m writing about. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to be the person to write it.”

For much of her adult life Loretta Lynn suffered severe health problems, and in 1972, when she was 40, she underwent breast-cancer surgery. But her career enjoyed a resurgence in 2004 when a long-term fan, Jack White (of the American band the White Stripes) produced her album Van Lear Rose.

The granddaughter of a Cherokee Indian, Loretta Lynn was a striking-looking woman. “I’m proud of being part-cherokee, and I think it’s time all us Indians felt the same way,” she said.

She continued to enjoy singing into old age, working with an eight-piece band that included her daughters Patsy and Peggy and son Ernest, and she owned an 18,000sq ft Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum.

In 1972 she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association, and was inducted into more music halls of fame than any other female recording artist.

As well as her 1976 autobiography, she published a second, Still Woman Enough, in 2002.

Having scooped a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, Loretta Lynn continued to be heaped with honours into her eighties. Her 2014 Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award (during which she stole the show with a seemingly effortless rendition of Coal Miner’s Daughter) followed a ceremony the previous year in which she joined Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin among the ranks of female vocalists awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour.

Her husband died in 1996. Two of her children also predeceased her.

Loretta Lynn, born April 14 1932, died October 4 2022

Obituaries

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