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Loretta Lynn, the country music icon who brought unparalleled candor about the domestic realities of working-class women to country songwriting — and taught those who came after her to speak their minds, too – died today at her home in Tennessee. She was 90 years old.
«Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,» her family said in a statement.
«The story of Loretta Lynn’s life is unlike any other, yet she drew from that story a body of work that resonates with people who might never fully understand her bleak and remote childhood, her hardscrabble early days, or her adventures as a famous and beloved celebrity,» Kyle Young, CEO of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said in a statement. «In a music business that is often concerned with aspiration and fantasy, Loretta insisted on sharing her own brash and brave truth.»
Born Loretta Webb, the singer was raised in a remote coal mining community in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. One of the biggest songs of her career, «Coal Miner’s Daughter,» proudly recounted her hardscrabble background.
Lynn was barely a teenager when she started a family of her own with a 21-year-old former soldier, Oliver Lynn, better known as «Mooney» or «Doolittle.» They wasted no time having the first four of their six children, and migrated to Washington State. It was there that her husband heard her bedtime lullabies and pushed her to start performing publicly. In a 2010 interview with Fresh Air, she insisted she wouldn’t have done it otherwise: «I wouldn’t get out in front of people. I was really bashful and I would have never sang in front of anybody.»
Once her husband started scrounging up paying gigs for her, Lynn taught herself to write songs, says country music historian and journalist Robert Oermann.
