Loretta Lynn

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Anna Hunt Graves

With such feisty hits as "You Ain't Woman Enough" and "Fist City," country singer/songwriter Loretta Lynn voiced the concerns of blue-collar women during the 1960s and 1970s. When Lynn came to Nashville in 1960, "girl singers" were still considered risky ventures by record executives and promoters. The first female superstar of the modern country industry, Lynn established herself as a true celebrity, capable of selling Crisco vegetable shortening as well as records and concert tickets. Her success as an entertainer also proved that she could remain true to her rural background and retain her traditional vocal style, even as Nashville and the industry were becoming increasingly sophisticated.

One of eight children, Lynn was born Loretta Webb, on April 14, 1935 in the poverty-stricken coal mining town of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. She married Oliver V. Lynn, who was known by the nicknames "Doolittle" and "Mooney" (because he made moonshine), three months before her fourteenth birthday. The newlyweds moved to Custer, Washington, and over the next four years had four children. Lynn's husband gave her a guitar purchased from Sears and Roebuck for her eighteenth birthday. Within a few years, she learned to play the instrument and began composing songs. Convinced of his wife's talent, Mooney took Lynn to local beer joints and got her a job as a singer with a country band. After winning a talent contest at an area fair, she appeared on a Tacoma television show hosted by rising country star Buck Owens. A former lumberman with an interest in music saw the program and gave Lynn the money to make a record in Los Angeles. Steel guitar virtuoso Speedy West rounded up quality California session players for her debut, and "I'm a Honky-Tonk Girl" was released on the tiny Zero label early in 1960. While Lynn's live performances usually featured current songs popularized by country stars, her first single was an original composition.

Lynn and her husband spent three months promoting the record themselves, mailing it to 3,500 radio stations and visiting numerous stations in person to ask the disc jockeys to play it. By the summer of 1960, the song had reached number 14 on the country charts. Lynn traveled to Nashville, the epicenter of the country industry and home of the Grand Ole Opry, where she made her first guest appearance in mid-October. With the help of the Wilburn Brothers, Doyle and Teddy, she obtained a contract with Decca Records (which became MCA in the early 1970s) despite producer Owen Bradley's objection that her voice closely resembled that of Kitty Wells. The Lynns moved to Nashville, and newcomer Loretta became Patsy Cline's protégée, even as other female artists conspired to keep her off the Opry. Though her style demonstrated characteristics of both Wells and Cline, Lynn eventually developed a sound of her own. She resisted efforts to polish her image as a performer, preferring cowboy boots to high-heeled shoes, and singing with an accent that betrayed her rural Kentucky upbringing.

Two years after her breakthrough hit, Lynn had her first Decca top ten single with "Success." Four years later, "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," co-written with her sister Peggy Sue Wells, became the first of sixteen number one records Lynn recorded between 1966 and 1975. During the 1960s, Lynn occasionally performed duets with honky-tonk legend Ernest Tubb, and the following decade she and Conway Twitty had several hits together. She became the first female recipient of the Country Music Association's (CMA) Entertainer of the Year award in 1972, and eight years later the CMA named her Artist of the Decade. Her best-selling autobiography, Coal Miner's Daughter, appeared in 1976, followed four years later by a film version starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones that brought the story of her career into the popular realm. Lynn branched out from music, opening a chain of western-wear stores and a dude ranch near her home in Tennessee. At the height of her career during the 1970s, she kept a punishing schedule that took its toll on her health. Although her recording career tapered off during the late 1980s, she continued to tour throughout the 1990s, taking some time off after the death of her husband in 1996.

Lynn's success surpassed that of any other female country artist during the 1960s and 1970s, and her immense popularity destroyed industry stereotypes about women performers. Her combination of traditional country styles with lyrics that reflected the modern working-class woman's perspective appealed to a large audience, particularly wives and mothers who faced the same problems she addressed in her songs. Lynn has spoken out against racism and illiteracy, and in the mid-1990s she warned women about the dangers of breast implants. She was not afraid of controversy, and stood behind songs such as "Rated X," which dealt with the stigma of being a divorced woman, and "The Pill," a paean to birth control. In Coal Miner's Daughter, Lynn notes that she is "not a big fan of Women's Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they're due." While she may not have considered herself a feminist, many of her songs exhibited a progressive attitude that was seldom found in country music. This assertion of pride in her gender and her working-class culture made Loretta Lynn the heir to Kitty Wells' title as "the Queen of Country Music," and one of the genre's female legends.