Loretta Lynn, whose heartfelt songs about life and love as the daughter of a Kentucky miner and an Appalachian woman lifted her out of poverty and made her a mainstay of country music, has died. He was 90 years old.
In a statement on Lynn's website, her family said she died Tuesday at their home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
"Our beloved mother, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully in her sleep this morning, October 4th, at her beloved farmhouse in Hurricane Mills," the family said. They asked for privacy because of their grief and said a memorial will be announced at a later date.
Before she began her career in the early 1960s, Lynn already had four children.
"I put him to sleep, and that's when Doe learned I could sing," Lynn said in an interview with CBS's Mo Rocca Sunday morning, referring to her husband. "He came into the room and I sang White Christmas and a few other songs."
His songs reflect his pride in rural Kentucky.
As a songwriter, she created a provocative image of women in contrast to the clichés of most country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control, and sometimes got into trouble with radio programmers for material even rock artists shunned.
Her biggest hits came in the '60s and '70s, including "Coal Miner's Daughter", "You're Not Woman Enough", "The Pill", "With on Your Mind", "Rated X" and "You Look Country". " ".. ". She was best known for appearing in loose dresses with delicate embroidery or rhinestones designed by her longtime personal assistant and designer, Tim Cope.
His integrity and unique place in country music has been rewarded. She was the first woman to win artist of the year in both major genre awards by the Country Music Association in 1972 and by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
"It's what I wanted to hear and what other women wanted to hear," Lynn told The Associated Press in 2016. "I didn't write for men, he wrote for us women. Men loved it too."
In 1969 she published her autobiography, The Coal Miner's Daughter, which helped her reach an even wider audience.
"We were poor but we had love / This was all my father cared about / He shoveled coal to make a dollar for a poor man," he sang.
The Coal Miner's Daughter, the title of her 1976 book, was produced in 1980 by the same name. Sissy Spacek's portrayal of Lynn won her an Oscar and the film was also nominated for Best Picture.
Lynn is past her commercial heyday, winning two Grammys for Van Lee's Roses, a 13-song album she wrote in 2005 that included "Portland, Oregon" for One Drunken Night. "Van Leer Rose" was a collaboration with rock singer Jack White, who produced the album and played guitar parts.
Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, was born and claimed her hometown as a butcher hoehler for one of Van Leer's coal mining companies in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. However, Holler was not a butcher. He later told a reporter that he came up with the name of the song based on the name of the family that lived there.
His father played the banjo, his mother played the guitar, and he grew up listening to the songs of the Carter family. Her younger sister, Crystal Gayle, is a Grammy-winning country singer and has had crossover hits with songs like "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" and "Half the Way." Lynn Patsy's daughter Lynn Russell was a songwriter and producer on some of her albums.
"I was singing when I was born," he told The Associated Press in 2016. My father came to the balcony where I rocked the children to sleep while singing. He said, Loretta, shut up. People in this noisy environment will hear you. I said, father, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins. "
She wrote in her autobiography that she was thirteen when she married Oliver "Money" Lane, but later the Associated Press discovered official records that she was fifteen . The biopic Mooney Lynne stars Tommy Lee Jones.
Her husband, whom she called Doe or Doolittle, encouraged her to study for a living and helped her get ahead early in her career.
He also bought her a guitar. Otherwise? "I'm not going to sit here today," Lynn said in an interview with The Sunday Morning Show.
With the help of her husband, she signed a record deal with Decca Records, then MCA, and performed on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. Lynn recorded her first single "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" which was released in 1960.
She teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of country music's most popular duos, with Grammy-winning songs like "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man" and "After the Fire Gone." Their duets and singles have always been country-driven, not crossovers or breakups.
When he began singing at the Grand Ole Opry, country music star Patsy Klein Lane took him under her wing and guided him through his early career.
Selected as Artist of the 1970s by the Academy of Country Music, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. He has won four Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008, and has received Kennedy Center Honors. He received an honorary degree in 2003 and the President's Freedom Medal in 2013 .
In Feast City, Lynn threatens another woman with a bitter fight if she doesn't go after her husband: "I'm here to tell you, girl, fire my man/If you don't wanna go to Feast City." This strong-willed but traditional country woman appears in Lynn's other songs as well. In "The Pill," a song about sex and birth control, Lynn writes that she's tired of taking care of the kids at home: "It's so easy to feel good now / Since I got the pill," you sing. .
He moved outside of Nashville to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee in the 1990s, where he created a full recreation of his childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The clothes he was wearing are also there.
Lynn knew her songs were groundbreaking, especially for country music, but she wrote the truth that many country women like her lived.
Because I worked in clubs, "I saw other women going through the same thing." "I'm not the only one who lived this life, and I'm not the only one who wrote what I wrote today," he told The Associated Press in 1995.
Lynn never stopped recording and in 2014 she signed a multi-album deal with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017 she suffered a stroke which forced her to stop touring , but in 2021 she released her 50th solo album Still Woman Enough.
She and her husband were married for nearly 50 years before his death in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and later twins Patsy and Peggy. Besides his wife, he had 17 grandchildren and four sons.
