Before becoming one of the jewels of country music, Loretta Lynn, who was the daughter of coal miners, is dead. She was aged 90 years old.
According to a statement from Lynn’s family, she passed away on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
“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 said in a statement. They asked for privacy.
She was the second of eight children born as Loretta Webb in the isolated Appalachian mountain community of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. The family lived in a log home with wallpaper created from Sears Roebuck catalog pages. Her early years were centered on the church where she first started to sing and the coal mine where her father worked. That hardscrabble beginning helped lay the groundwork for her status as the voice of working class women — most famously through her signature 1970 hit, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” an ode to her father, Melvin Webb, who died of black lung disease 11 years earlier.
“I write about my life — in every song I’ve written,” Lynn told TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager in 2018.
“I would have given anything in the world if he (my father) would have been here when I recorded ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ but I think he hears me,” Lynn told Hager. “And one day I will sing it for him.”
Her younger sister went on to have a very successful country career of her own under the name Crystal Gayle, demonstrating the abundance of ability in that family.
A lifetime’s worth of lyrics had already been amassed by the time Lynn went to Nashville in 1960 on the strength of her breakthrough hit “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” and a tireless promotional drive to radio stations across the nation.
She was a housewife in Washington with four young children when a scout for Zero Records discovered her crooning in a small club in Vancouver. She was only 15 when she married a 21-year-old war veteran Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn; she falsely claimed in her autobiography that she had married at the age of 13.
She was a housewife in Washington with four young children when a scout for Zero Records discovered her crooning in a small club in Vancouver. She was only 15 when she married a 21-year-old war veteran Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn; she falsely claimed in her autobiography that she had married at the age of 13.
Her popularity was rapid once she made the cross-country trek to Music City.
The song “Success,” the first for Decca Records and the first of Lynn’s eventual 51 top-10 successes, marked his breakthrough two years later.
