Loretta Lynn Part I

Loretta is one of the women singers, whose career took off, in the 1960s, and who changed the image of women in country. Her life was often stormy and difficult, and yet she has had a successful career and gutsily made her way through hard times. Born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932, she was one of a large family of children born to Theodore “Ted” Webb, who was a coal miner and small farmer. Like Dolly Parton in Tennessee, she was born into poverty, and was never ashamed of it. It gave her material for her songs. One of Dolly’s most heart rending songs is Coat of Many Colours, where she writes about how her mother made her a coat out of rags and bits of cloth, because they couldn’t afford a new one. And how when the kids at school laughed at her coat, Dolly compared it to Joseph’s coat in the Bible. Loretta’s most famous song is Coal Miner’s daughter, about her father and mother and how they reared their family, somehow managing to find enough money to keep them and giving them love in spite of their poverty. Her father gave up mining, and moved to Indiana, where he rang a store, but he died at the age of 52 from “black lung” or “Coal workers' pneumoconiosis”. Loretta was married very young to Oliver Lynn, whom she variously called “Doolittle” or “Mooney”. He was a young working man, who had just returned from World War Two, and when she was 15 or so, they married. Doolittle worked hard, but he was rough and abusive to her, at times and he had alcohol problems. But their marriage endured until he died... Loretta later claimed that “he never hit her but she hit him twice” -. And in spite of all the storms of their life, they stayed together and she nursed him in his later illnesses. They had 6 children in all; the first ones were born when she and Doolittle were an impoverished working class couple, trying to make a living. They moved to Washington a year or so after the marriage, when she was pregnant with their first child. Three more children were born in in the next few years. She loved to sing and Doolittle believed she had talent, so he bought her a guitar and insisted that she learned to play it. In the late 1950s, she started her singing career, with Doolittle pushing and helping to manage her. Her brother played with her in a small band, and in 1960, she cut her first record. She wrote her own songs and they were inspired like Hank Williams and Audrey, by her stormy relationships with Doolittle. Her songs were about the life of impoverished rural women of the time. Women who married young, were poor, and had too many pregnancies, whose husbands were abusive or unfaithful or drank.