Country music star Loretta Lynn dies at 90

Loretta Lynn, the “coal miner’s daughter” whose gritty lyrics and high-pitched, homely vocals made her a country music queen for seven decades, has died. She was 90 years old.

Lynn’s family said in a statement to CNN that she died on Tuesday (4) at her home in Tennessee.

“Our precious mother, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4, while sleeping at home on her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the statement read.

They asked for privacy as they grieve and said a memorial will be announced later.

Lynn, who had no formal musical training but spent hours every day singing her babies to sleep, was known for producing fully textured music in a matter of minutes. She just wrote what she knew.

She lived in poverty for much of her life, started having children at 17 and spent years married to a man prone to drinking and flirting – all of which became material for her frank songs. Lynn’s life was rich in experiences that most country stars at the time didn’t have—but her fans knew them intimately.

“So when I sing those country songs about women struggling to keep things going, you could say I’ve been there,” she wrote in her first memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” “Like I said, I know what it’s like to be pregnant and nervous and poor.”

Lynn had hits with fiery songs like “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)”, which topped the country charts in 1966 and made her the first country singer to write a number one hit.

Their songs told the story of the family, skewered bad husbands and mourned women, wives and mothers everywhere. His tell-a-like style saw tracks like “Rated X” and “The Pill” banned from radio even as they became beloved classics.

“I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” Lynn told Esquire in 2007. “I was just the first to stand up and say what I thought, what life was all about.”

She grew up poor in the Kentucky hills

She was born Loretta Webb in 1932, one of eight Webb children raised in Butcher Hollow, in the mining town of Van Lear, Kentucky, in the Appalachians. Growing up, Lynn sang in church and at home, even when her father protested that everyone in Butcher Hollow could hear.

His family had little money. But those early years were some of her fondest memories, as she recounts in her 1971 hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter”: “We were poor, but we had love; That’s the only thing Dad made sure of.”

As a teenager, Loretta met the love of her life in Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, whom she affectionately called “Doo”. The couple married when Lynn was 15 years old — a fact made clear in 2012 after the Associated Press discovered that Lynn was a few years older than she had claimed in her memoir — and Lynn gave birth to her first of six children the same year. year.

“When I got married, I didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant,” said Lynn, who had four children in the first four years of their marriage and a set of twins years later.

“I was five months pregnant when I went to the doctor and he said, ‘You’re going to have a baby.’ I said, ‘No way. I can’t have any babies. He said, ‘Aren’t you married?’ Yup. He said, ‘Do you sleep with your husband?’ Yup. “You’re having a baby, Loretta. Believe me.’ And I did.”

The couple soon went to Washington state in search of work. Music was not a priority for the young mother at first. She spent her days working mostly, picking strawberries in Washington state while her babies sat on a blanket nearby.

But when her husband heard her humming and lulling their babies to sleep, he said she sounded better than the singers on the radio. He bought her a $17 Harmony guitar and got her a gig at a local tavern.

In 1960 she recorded what would become her debut single, “Honky Tonk Girl”. She then took the song on the road, playing on country music stations across the United States.

After years of hard work and raising children, telling stories with her guitar felt like a break.

“Singing was easy,” Lynn told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2010. “I thought, ‘Gee, this is an easy job.’”

The success of her first single landed Lynn onstage at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and, soon, a deal with Decca Records. She quickly befriended country star Patsy Cline, who guided her through the fame and fashion of country stardom until her shocking death in a plane crash in 1963.

Cline “was my only partner at the time. She took me under her wing, and when I lost her, it was something else. I still miss her to this day,” Lynn told The Denver Post in 2009.

“I wrote ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man,’ and she said, ‘Loretta, that’s a hit.’ That shocked me, because you don’t expect someone like Patsy Cline to tell you that you have a hit. Right after she passed away, I released the record and it was a hit.”

His best-known songs were taken from his life and marriage.

Lynn’s struggle and success has become a legend, an oft-repeated story of youth, naivety and poverty.

From “Fist City” to “You’re Lookin’ at Country,” Lynn always sang from the heart, whether she was scolding a woman interested in Doo or honoring her Appalachian roots. But her music was far from conventional.

She angered the country’s conservative market with songs like “Rated X,” about the stigma fun women face after divorce, and “The Pill,” in which a woman toasts her newfound freedom thanks to birth control — ” They didn’t have any of those pills when I was younger, or I would have swallowed them like popcorn,” Lynn wrote in her memoir.

She documented her upbringing in the 1976 bestselling memoir “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” co-written with George Vecsey. A 1980 biopic of the same name won an Oscar for actress Sissy Spacek and brought Lynn further fame. Lynn’s success also helped launch the music careers of her sisters, Peggy Sue Wright and Crystal Gayle.

Lynn’s legend faced questioning in 2012, when the Associated Press reported that in census records, birth certificates, and marriage certificates, Lynn was three years older than most biographies claimed. It didn’t detract from Lynn’s success, but it did make the oft-repeated tales of her teenage marriage and motherhood less extreme.

“I never, ever thought about being a model,” Lynn told the San Antonio Express-News in 2010. “I wrote about life, how things were in my life. I could never understand why others didn’t write what they knew.”

Lynn has always credited her husband with the confidence to take that first step on stage as a young artist. She has also spoken in interviews and in her music about the pain he has caused over their nearly 50 years of marriage. Doolittle Lynn died in 1996 after years of complications from heart problems and diabetes.

In her 2002 memoir, Still Woman Enough, Lynn wrote that he was an alcoholic who cheated on her and beat her up, even as she fought back. But she stuck with him until his death and told NPR in 2010 that “he’s in there somewhere” in every song she wrote.

“We fought one day and we would love it the next day, so I mean… for me, that’s a good relationship,” she told NPR. “If you can’t fight, if you can’t tell each other what you think – why, your relationship isn’t much anyway.”

Lynn has won numerous awards throughout her career, including three Grammys and many Academy of Country Music honors. She won Grammys for her 1971 duet with Conway Twitty, “After the Fire is Gone,” and for the 2004 album “Van Lear Rose,” a collaboration with Jack White of the White Stripes that introduced her to a new generation of fans.

She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988, and her song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. She received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 and, in 2013, received the Presidential Medal Award from Freedom.

President Barack Obama said Lynn “gave a generation a voice, singing what no one wanted to say and saying what no one wanted to think.”

Her career and legend only continued to grow in her later years as she recorded new music, toured steadily and attracted a loyal following well into her 80s. A museum and ranch are dedicated to Lynn at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

“Working keeps you young,” she told Esquire in 2007. “I’m never going to stop. And when I do, it will be on stage. It will be.

Lynn was hospitalized in 2017 after suffering a stroke at her home. The following year, she broke her hip. Her health forced her to stop touring.

In early 2021, at the age of 89, she recorded her 50th album “Still Woman Enough”.

The title song, which she sang alongside successors Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire, sounded like a mission statement that captured the spirit of her career:

“I’m still woman enough, still got what it takes inside

I know how to love, lose and survive

There’s not much I haven’t seen, I haven’t tried

I got knocked down but I never got out of the fight

I’m strong, I’m affectionate, I’m wise, but I’m strong

And let me tell you when it comes to love

I’m still woman enough.”