Loretta Lynn’s bold and open-hearted voice cut through the din of the honky tonk, the distortion of the AM radio dial and the oppressive silence that protected post-War sexism. That voice was silenced on Tuesday morning when the iconic artist died at the age of 90 at her home in Hurricane Mills, TN, but she leaves a legacy of candor, empathy, courage and resilience that influenced American music and culture as much as any singer-songwriter born in the 20th century.
Lynn was and will always remain the very definition of country music, a Hall of Famer, a multiple Grammy Award winner and a 60-year member of the Grand Ole Opry as of last month. She embraced and enlarged upon the old-time, blues and honky tonk sounds that she fell for on the radio as a girl, but through her incisive, feminist songwriting, Loretta Lynn brought a progressive consciousness to a genre that needed shaking up in the 1960s and 70s. She broke numerous Music Row taboos, singing directly and disarmingly about infidelity, sexual coercion, motherhood and birth control. She wove true stories of her impoverished, rural upbringing into many songs over her seven-decade career, and she counterpoised her glamorous stage image with authentic homespun humility that spoke to working-class fans, especially women.
“When I would get down after doing a show, people would want me to come down and sit with them, and the women would tell me, ‘I went through that,’” Lynn said in a television interview I co-produced in the mid 2000s. In the same documentary, the late music journalist and publicist Hazel Smith said that Lynn “made all of us stronger and all of us better, because Loretta was really, really somebody who opened the door for women that would not have been opened had it not been for her.”
Loretta Lynn’s journey to stardom was like an obstacle course shaped by American history. She was born April 14, 1932, in the heart of the Great Depression, in one of the poorest places in the country, Butcher Holler, KY. Her autobiographical smash hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was essentially accurate in its details.
My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines
All day long in the field a hoin' corn
Mommy rocked the babies at night
And read the Bible by the coal oil light
And ever' thing would start all over come break of morn
Her life changed when she married Oliver Lynn in 1948, just shy of her 16th birthday. He moved his new family to Washington state to pursue better work, and Loretta became mother to ultimately six children. Oliver, known as “Doo” or “Mooney” (from his background selling moonshine) had problems with alcohol, domestic violence and infidelity that would later inspire some of Loretta’s songs, but he did buy her a guitar and champion her nascent singing career. A television talent show led to a local record contract and her first single. “Honky Tonk Girl” reached the top 20 and got the attention of the Grand Ole Opry.
In Nashville, brothers Doyle and Teddy Wilburn helped Lynn’s career with a publishing deal and spots on their television show, and her rise to fame began in earnest in 1960. While the Wilburns’ contract would ultimately prove exploitive, Lynn found authentic support in friend Patsy Cline, the inspired production of Owen Bradley, and a string of classic duets with honky tonk icon Ernest Tubb. Her early solo hits included “Before I’m Over You,” “Blue Kentucky Girl” and “The Home You’re Tearing Down.” In 1966, with “Dear Uncle Sam,” she started having success with her own original songs, inaugurating an era-shaping body of work.
In “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” Loretta stepped forward as a self-assured, independent woman who’d stick up for herself. Then a year later in 1967, that pugnacity turned homeward with “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind),” which went to No. 1. She attacked the stigma against divorce in “Rated X” and “I Wanna Be Free.” And she really caused a stir with 1975’s “The Pill,” a celebration of women’s sexual autonomy that blended her plainspoken humor with her righteous indignation. It was the first of several Loretta Lynn songs that were banned from some radio stations, a story told in detail in Season One of the podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones.
Loretta could say what she wanted because by the 70s she was a national superstar. Her long duet partnership with Conway Twitty produced fantastic songs including “After The Fire Is Gone” and “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man.” She became the first woman to win the CMA Award for Entertainer of the Year in 1972 and the Academy of Country Music named her Artist of the Decade. She’d go on to be enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and receive the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, among many other accolades.
While she had some spells of withdrawal from the public due to the stresses of the road and her long, often troubled marriage, Lynn continued to find fresh ways to contribute to the country music legacy she loved so much. In 1993, she collaborated with Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton on the Gold album Honky Tonk Angels. In 2004, she released Van Lear Rose, a rocking partnership with Jack White that won two Grammy Awards and the Americana Album of the Year prize. Her most recent album, 2021’s Still Woman Enough, produced by John Carter Cash and her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell, was her 46th solo studio LP.
Like Dolly Parton, Lynn was able to project and protect liberal values in the conservative universe of country music without being labeled as such or becoming embroiled in partisan politics. Loretta’s hits offered room and inspiration for many of her peers, including Jean Shepard’s “A Real Good Woman,” Billie Jo Spears’s “Mr. Walker It’s All Over,” and Jeannie C. Riley’s smash takedown “Harper Valley P.T.A.”.
“None of (these assertive women of country of the 70s) would ever call themselves ‘feminist,’ but all of them reflected working-class women in song,” wrote Robert K. Oermann and Mary Bufwack in their 1993 book Finding Her Voice: The Saga Of Women In Country Music. “They couldn’t relate to the middle-class womens’ movement of the time, but they could relate to The People.” None more closely or warmly than Loretta Lynn.
