LORETTA LYNN (1932 - 2022)

Loretta Lynn, the legendary country music singer and songwriter has passed away peacefully in her sleep on October 4th at the age of ninety. She had still been recording, releasing her fiftieth studio album, "Still Woman Enough" just last year and performing although she was forced to slow down after having a stroke in 2017.

Lynn may have taken on the traditional aesthetic expected of a female country singer, elephantine hair and flowing, frilly dresses, yet her music was far from conventional. Her songs, many of them self-penned and based on lived experiences, boldly took on common themes in a way that was confrontational and challenging while reflecting on subjects in song that were not usually discussed publicly at the time, especially by a female artist. 

As detailed in her popular 1970 hit song, "Coal Miner's Daughter", Lynn was one of eight children born to Clara and Ted Webb who was a farmer and later, coal miner in Butcher Hollow, KY. The family struggled financially and the fifteen year old Loretta fell in love and married Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn who was seven years her senior. One reason she was happy to leave home was so she didn't have to take care of her younger siblings yet she became a mother of four by the time she was eighteen.

The family moved to Washington state in search of work. After overhearing Loretta singing along with the radio, "Doo" bought his young wife a guitar. She taught herself how to play and began writing her own songs. Lynn began performing at honky-tonks and talent contests before her life changed when businessman, Norm Burley heard her sing on a local television show. He got her to Los Angeles to meet producer, Don Grashey, signed her to his indie label, Zero Records and had her record the song that Burley heard Lynn perform that she wrote: "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl". The song became a hit in 1960, reaching number fourteen on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, largely due to the Lynns traveling across the states to country music stations to get them to play the record.

She later met the Wilburn Brothers, a country music duo who had a publishing company, and they helped Lynn get signed to a major label, Decca Records. Beginning with the single, "Success" in 1962, Lynn had a long string of top ten country singles, going on well into the 1970's. Some of her early hits were "Blue Kentucky Girl", "Wine, Women, and Song", "Before I'm Over You", "What Kind of a Girl (Do You Think I Am)" and "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)", the 1967 number one song that became the first Gold record written by a female Country artist.

Yet some of her most popular songs (which she had written) were also the most controversial. This included "Dear Uncle Sam" which dealt with the human cost of the Vietnam War; "Fist City", "Your Squaw Is on the Warpath", and "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" were all about cheating and the aggressive lengths she will go to stop a woman from trying to steal her man; "Rated "X" talked about the stigma around divorced women and "The Pill" from 1975 which Lynn boldly proclaimed the benefits of birth-control pills. In 1971, Lynn began a musical partnership with Conway Twitty and the duo enjoyed five consecutive number one hits through 1975.

A film based on the 1976 autobiography Lynn co-wrote with George Vecsey was made in 1980 with Sissy Spacek starring as the country singer and Tommy Lee Jones appearing as her husband. "Coal Miner's Daughter" went on to become a box-office hit, receiving seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and winning Spacek the Oscar for Best Actress.

After many years of great popularity and success, by the 1990's, with country music shifting more towards a slick, pop-oriented sound, Lynn's style of music fell out of favor. But Lynn had a career resurgence in 2004 by teaming up with an unlikely source: Jack White of the alt-rock band, the White Stripes. He produced "Van Lear Rose", which Lynn wrote or co-wrote all of the tracks, and this collection, merging classic country with thrashing rock, became a critical and commercial success, crossing over to the pop charts and winning the Grammy Award for Best Country Album of that year. 

Lynn was one of the most honored and successful artists in country music having seventy-eight songs chart on the Billboard Hot Country Song chart with fifty-three reaching the top-ten, had ten number one albums, won three Grammy Awards, thirteen Academy of Country Music Awards including ACM Artist of the Decade (1970's), a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

Lynn was married to Oliver Lynn for almost fifty turbulent yet loving years until he died at age sixty-nine in 1996. The singer is survived by three sisters including Crystal Gayle who became a popular country singer in the mid '70's, four of her six children and seventeen grandchildren.

Here is just a tiny fraction of the enduring music by the incredibly gifted Loretta Lynn and these are a few of my favorites: