Loretta Lynn died on Tuesday at the age of 90 at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. Lynn, born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932, was the second-born of eight children. Her father, who worked as a coal miner, died at the age of 52 after he contracted black lung disease. Lynn’s autobiographical song “Coal Miner’s Daughter”---which is also the title of her memoir—reached No. 1 in 1970. She was the first female country artist to have a No. 1 hit.
Her family released a statement saying she died in her sleep at her ranch about 70 miles west of Nashville. “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 statement read.
Lynn was first married at the age of 15 and began having children at the age of 16, making her a grandmother in her early 30s. She had no formal training to prepare her for country stardom, but she would instead spend hours singing to her children, of which she had six, to sleep and used experiences from her impoverished, rural life to inspire her songwriting. Her unique voice was marked by a Kentucky drawl, a coiled vibrato and a deep sound. Her husband Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn bought her a guitar in 1953.
“Singing was easy,” Lynn told Terry Gross, a journalist for NPR, in 2010. “I thought ‘Gee whiz, this is an easy job.’”
Lynn started her own band called Loretta and the Trailblazers and cut her first record “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” in 1960. The first of her 16 No. 1 hits, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” was released in 1967 and is based on her husband, who was a heavy drinker and sold bootleg whiskey.
“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90 percent of the time every line in there was for him,” Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000, four years after her husband died. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.”
Lynn, who was a supporter of former President Donald Trump and a socially conservative Christian, wrote a controversial song with three others called “The Pill” about a woman who is fed-up with getting repeatedly pregnant by her husband and decides to go on birth control.
“All these years I’ve stayed at home/While you had your fun/And every year that’s gone by/Another baby’s come/There’s a gonna be some changes made/Right here on nursery hill/You’ve set this chicken your last time/’Cause now I’ve got the pill,” sings Lynn.
The 1975 song is from the perspective of a married woman celebrating her ability to control her own body. At least 60 radio stations in America refused to play “The Pill”, though it managed to sell 15,000 copies a week following its release. The controversy helped sell the song. And in a 1975 interview with Playgirl, Lynn said that the “medical professionals routinely told her that ‘The Pill’ had done more to promote rural acceptance of birth control than any official medical or social services efforts.”