Country singer Loretta Lynn has died. Those who heard her voice in her early years often had a hard time recovering from that avalanche of Kentucky accents, V-belt vocal cords, and a grudge against everything that defined the masculinity of her day. Some of their song titles spoke for themselves. “You are the reason why our children are so ugly”, “Don’t come home drunk and think that you can still land” and to the competition: “You are not woman enough to take my husband from me”.
She was born in Butcher Hollow, a buddy town on a high plateau in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky where coal miners lived in wooden shacks. Her father worked in the tunnels there and died of “black lung”. One of their biggest hits was “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in 1970. That was also the title of her autobiography, which Michael Apted filmed with Sissy Spacek, who received an Oscar for the role. Her life story was more a war story than a love story.
In her early thirties she became a grandmother for the first time
At 15, she married good-for-nothing Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, who sold homemade booze, drank too much, hung out with way too many women, and became the inspiration for many of her angry songs. By the time she was 19, she had four children. In her early thirties she became a grandmother for the first time. But Lynn bought her first guitar and became the manager of a career that was unusual in the 1960s, when most country stars were male. Especially as a woman who wrote many of her songs herself and very clearly from her own perspective. It was all a far cry from the “stand by your man” humility of her contemporaries. And despite the many crises, the marriage lasted almost fifty years until his death in 1996.
But Lynn’s anger was not only directed at machismo and her rivals. In 1966 she released one of the first anti-Vietnam War songs, “Dear Uncle Sam”. She sang for the right to contraception with “The Pill” and against the double standards with which divorced women were punished by society with “Rated X”. Her hits have been banned from the radio more than once. Despite this, she remained at the forefront of country music throughout her life. She even got her start in the world of rock snobs and hipsters again in the early noughties when White Stripes guitarist Jack White produced her album “Van Lear Rose”. She has performed at festivals like Bonnaroo, recorded duets with the likes of Sheryl Crow and Elvis Costello. And despite her superstar status, she always stood for the defiance of those in America’s heartland who didn’t let the passage of time buy in their guts, even if the country’s elites ridiculed her as “white trash” or ridiculed her for their own reactionary politics.
She died Tuesday at the Hurricane Mills home in Tennessee, an hour’s drive from Nashville. She has long held pride of place in the pantheon of working-class heroines. She was 90 years old.