The guitar cost 17 dollars, and it changed everything. Loretta Lynn, a teenage wife from a Kentucky coal camp, taught herself to play it on the floor of her small house, with babies asleep in the next room. She was born in Butcher Hollow in 1932, the daughter of a miner, and by the time she was 15 she had married Oliver Lynn and left the hollow behind. No record label was looking for her. No one in Nashville knew her name. Loretta Lynn died on October 4, 2022.
A husband's belief and a self-made debut
Her husband believed in her before anyone else did. He heard her singing around the house and pushed her to write her own songs and perform them in small clubs. In 1960 they scraped together a plan: she signed with Zero Records, a label so small it barely existed, and recorded 'I'm a Honky Tonk Girl'. Then the couple did something no polished star would do. They packed the records into their car and drove from one radio station to the next, asking disc jockeys to play it.
The song climbed to number 14 on the Billboard country chart. That was enough to get her noticed, and soon she was recording for Decca Records, a major label. But Loretta Lynn was not interested in being a sweet, safe country singer. She wrote about marriage as she actually knew it: the jealousy, the drinking, the anger. 'You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)' hit number 2 and made her the first woman in country music to write a number one hit.
Bolder songs and controversial topics
The songs kept coming, and they kept getting bolder. 'Rated X' talked about the shame heaped on divorced women. 'The Pill' celebrated birth control at a time when radio stations hesitated to play it. These were not polite topics for a country singer in the early 1970s, and that was exactly the point. She was writing from the life she had lived, and women across America heard their own lives in her voice.
Her own story became the biggest song of all. 'Coal Miner's Daughter' reached number one on the Billboard country chart, and the title stuck to her forever. The autobiography she published in 1976 spent more than 8 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. A few years later the film version arrived, with Sissy Spacek playing Loretta, and Spacek won an Oscar for the role. A girl from Butcher Hollow was now known around the world.
The industry took notice of what she had done. She became the first woman to win the Country Music Association's Entertainer of the Year award. Decades later, when she was already a legend, she made an album with Jack White of The White Stripes. 'Van Lear Rose' reached number 24 on the Billboard Top 200 and won two Grammy Awards. A new generation discovered her, and she sounded as sharp as ever.
She kept recording into her eighties, releasing new albums and collecting honors. By the end, she had recorded 70 albums, including 54 studio records. On the fourth of October 2022, Loretta Lynn died in her sleep at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90 years old. The girl with the 17-dollar guitar had become one of the most important voices in American music, and she did it by telling the truth about her own life.