NASHVILLE – Loretta Lynn, who rose from a hardscrabble upbringing to become the most culturally significant female singer-songwriter in country music history, has died. She was 90.
Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning (Oct. 4) in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch,” her family said in a statement provided to USA TODAY.
Lynn was a mother of four when she launched her career in the early 1960s, and though many of her songs are filled with specifics of her wholly unique life, they had a universal appeal. She wrote about intimate matters – from her difficult, wearying childhood to fights with her husband – yet managed to strike a collective nerve.
Without ever mentioning politics or women’s liberation, her 1960s and 1970s hits helped change long-held notions about gender roles. “Rated ‘X’ ” and “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” were personal pleas – not political treatises – that sought an end to double standards.
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Lynn did all this at a time when women were most often the voices through which men’s words and melodies were heard. She was Nashville’s first prominent woman to write and record her own material, and was one of the first female music stars to generate her own hits.
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When she was set to receive her Kennedy Center Honor in 2003, Lynn told The (Nashville) Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY network, that she wasn’t sure why people found her culture-shaking songs so remarkable.
“Cultural contributions? What’s that?” she asked. “I was just sayin’ it like I was livin’ it. People’d go around that, but I went right through the middle.”
She was the first woman named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
In her 1970 smash hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn told the story of her upbringing, which helped her reach her widest audience yet.
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“We were poor but we had love / That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of / He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar,” she sang.
“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” also the title of her 1976 book, was made into a 1980 movie of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Academy Award and the film was also nominated for best picture.
Long after her commercial peak, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” about a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.
“She is the single most important female singer-songwriter of the 20th century,” White told The Tennessean at the time.
Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she claimed her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the coal mining company town of Van Lear in the mountains of east Kentucky. There really wasn’t a Butcher Holler, however. She later told a reporter that she made up the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families that lived there.
Her daddy played the banjo, her mama played the guitar and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family.
“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.’”
She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she got married to Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later discovered state records that showed she was 15. 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 earned 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 the most popular duos in country music with hits such as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone,” which earned them a Grammy Award. Their duets, and her single records, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.
The Academy of Country Music chose her as artist of the decade for the 1970s, and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988.
In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens a hair-pulling fistfight if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man / If you don’t want to go to Fist City.” That strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill,” a song about sex and birth control, Lynn writes about how she’s sick of being trapped at home to take care of babies: “The feelin’ good comes easy now / Since I’ve got the pill,” she sang.
She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she set up a ranch complete with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known for wearing are there, too.
Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.
“Cultural contributions? What’s that?” she asked The Tennessean in 2003 when she was set to receive her Kennedy Center Honor. “I was just sayin’ it like I was livin’ it. People’d go around that, but I went right through the middle.”
Contributing: Elise Brisco, USA TODAY, and Kristin M. Hall, The Associated Press
