By turning straw into gold records, Loretta Lynn helped me love where I come from

I first met Loretta Lynn’s music through “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 movie based on Lynn’s 1976 memoir of the same name (written with George Vescey), which I’m almost certain my parents wanted me to watch in order to appreciate the songs. This is a real story, I remember my parents saying. And that seemed to make it matter more, make it strong and deep, to help the music lodge in my heart.

We had our real stories too, after all, and like many rural Americans, they lined up not too far away from Lynn’s. On Tuesday, Lynn died at her home in Tennessee at the age of 90. 

In her 60-year career as a country music artist, she had multiple gold albums including hits such as “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” A three-time Grammy Award-winner (nominated 18 times), she is the most awarded female country recording artist ever with 11 No. 1 albums and 24 No.1 hit singles. She toured for over 50 years, including at the Nelsonville Music Festival in Appalachian, Ohio,  where – pregnant with my child, standing in a muddy field beside my neighbors – I watched her. Lynn wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky (a place made famous, and slightly fictionalized, in her songs) in 1932, one of eight children. She married at 15 to a man in his 20s and gave birth to her first child at 16. She had five more kids and didn’t sing in public for a decade. As The New York Times wrote, “Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington” to a logging community when she was first pregnant. 

Her long marriage to Oliver V. Lynn Jr. (aka Doolittle, Doo and Mooney), dramatized in many of her songs, was difficult. “Doolittle,” who would later manage Lynn’s career, drank and wasn’t always faithful. He bought his teenage wife a $17 guitar after hearing her sing as she did housework. Forming a band with her brother Jay Lee on lead guitar, Lynn played around Washington and released her first record “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960.

Seven years later, she had her first No. 1 hit. Her songs were as unflinching as her voice, a no-nonsense register that was as clear as it was melodic. As John Carter Cash, son of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and producer of Lynn’s later albums, told The New York Times, “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will.” 

And what Lynn sang about got her banned from radio stations in 1975 when the song she wrote, “The Pill,” became a celebratory rallying cry for reproductive freedom, which scandalized some parts of the nation. As Rolling Stone reported, Lynn said, “I never had the money to buy the pill. If I had it, I wouldn’t have had a bunch of kids.” She sang about being a divorced woman with “Rated X,” sang about leaving domestic chores behind in “Hey Loretta,” where poet Shel Silverstein wrote lyrics like, “This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.”

She sang a lot about cheating, being betrayed. According to The New York Times, country legend Patsy Cline helped Lynn stand up for herself, against her husband, when the two musicians met after Lynn moved to Nashville. “Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her,” The New York Times wrote. “He used the term ‘spanking’ to describe the times he hit her.” For listeners, Lynn was there for all the complicated seasons of a woman’s life. She wrote a book about her friendship with Cline in 2020’s “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust.”

Lynn was also there for rural life, singing about country living in a way that I, a person born in the country to a family of farmers, had never heard before. Never so openly. Lynn was proud. “I’m proud to be a coal miner’s daughter,” she sang directly. I was a Kentucky coal miner’s great-granddaughter, and Lynn’s straightforward words, “The work we done was hard. / At night we’d sleep ’cause we were tired” recalled my grandfather’s second wife, telling me stories of the company store. Lynn had the same accent as my family when we visited southern Indiana, on the Kentucky border, where my relatives had farms perched like the last trees on a cliff, their roots hanging perilously over the edge. My parents didn’t have that accent anymore, except when we came home. 

As benefitting a country music matriarch with her long dark hair and glimmering stage outfits, Lynn was glamourous but grounded. She knew hard work, a hard life. She lived it, and her songs spoke of traveling the long road of rural womanhood with its twists and turns of sex, abuse, motherhood, family, struggle and love. “I never thought of ever leaving,” she sang, though she did. Most of us did, even if we didn’t want to. Lynn came back.

In 2010, she received a lifetime achievement Grammy. She was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2003. A year later, Jack White produced her wildly popular album “Van Lear Rose,” which won a Grammy. Her long-term recording project with Carter Cash was to set down new songs, Christmas classics and Appalachian tunes from her childhood. Her most recent album “Still Woman Enough” was released in 2021. 

Lynn stopped touring in 2017, after a stroke. Mere months after that stroke, Lynn appeared on stage at the Country Music Hall of Fame, performing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from a chair with her family all around her. 

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I remember that on stage in Appalachia, her pink ballgown made her look like the dancer on a music box, her tulle skirts voluminous and sparkly enough to be seen from the very back of the crowd. She dazzled and owned it. She was nearly 80 at the time. But she also wasn’t alone. Lynn’s children are singers and songwriters in their own right, and her band included family members who took turns at the mic, allowing Lynn to preserve her voice, still crystal-clear after such a long career, and giving others the chance to shine. 

As Appalachian writer Amy Jo Burns wrote on Twitter, “Loretta Lynn always told the true story behind the lyrics, and we all loved her for it. All hail the queen of true stories not told, but sung.”

Lynn’s songs turned straw into gold, a lesson that lived experiences matter, which can apply to all storytellers, no matter your medium. No matter where you come from: keep your roots close. Keep your family with you, and make your stories real enough to ring true forever, true enough to call us home.