Loretta Lynn, the singer from Kentucky and coal miner’s daughter who wrote so many hit, frank songs about the average life of a rural woman has died. She was 90 years old at the time of her death.
Ms. Lynn’s family, speaking in a statement to The Associated Press, said that Ms. Lynn died in her rance home in Hurricane Mills Tennessee. In their words:
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills.”
The family added that a memorial will be announced later and also asked for privacy in their grief.
Ms. Lynn moved to Hurricane Mills, the place of her death and a spot outside of Nashville, in the 1990s. It was there that she set up a ranch to live on along with both a replica of her childhood home and a museum. That museum has since become a popular tourist stop.
Ms. Lynn’s career was defined by the place of her upbringing and her experience as a woman in that environment. A defiantly tough woman, Ms. Lynn wrote about all the topics a rural woman in Appalachia had to deal with, from cheating husbands and sex and love to being a coal miner’s daughter.
Speaking about why she wrote songs about those topics, Lynn told the AP in 2016 “It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too. I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”
It was that last topic, being a coal miner’s daughter, that led to the most fame for Ms. Lynch. Her song by that name came out in 1969 and was also the title of her book and of a 1980 movie.
Following her rise to fame in the 1960s, Lynn was widely acclaimed, named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then also by the Academy of Country Music in 1975.
The Western Journal, adding more details on Ms. Lynn’s upbringing and background, noted that:
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 father played the banjo, her mother 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.’”
“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ‘cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.
She and her husband were married nearly 50 years before he died in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and then twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
By: Gen Z Conservative
