Loretta Lynn, country singer of love and hardship, dies aged 90
Loretta Lynn, whose tales of heartbreak and poverty are among the most celebrated in the country music canon, has died aged 90.
Lynn died at home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, on 4 October, her family confirmed.
Beginning with 1966’s Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on
Your Mind), she topped the US country charts 16 times and was nominated for 18 Grammy awards, winning three. She recorded 60 studio albums in all.
Born Loretta Webb in a one-room rural Kentucky cabin in 1932, Lynn was one of eight siblings and the daughter of a coal miner – a fact that led to her signature song, 1970’s Coal Miner’s Daughter.
She was married at the age of 15 to 21-year-old Oliver Lynn, a month after she had met him. Despite Oliver’s frequent infidelity and struggle with alcoholism, the couple remained together for 48 years, until Oliver died in 1996. They had six children together, three of them before Lynn was 20.
Oliver bought her a guitar as an anniversary present in 1953, and Lynn started a band with her brother Jay Lee, Loretta and the Trailblazers, while she lived as a housewife, now in Washington state. She began writing her own songs and released her debut single, I’m a Honky-Tonk Girl, in 1960. It was released on a small independent label, and she and Oliver doggedly marketed the single themselves by driving from one country radio station to another. “Because we were too poor to stay in hotels, we slept in the car and ate baloney and cheese sandwiches in the parks … we were on the road three months,” she later remembered.
The song was a success, reaching the country Top 20, and led to her being signed by a major label, Decca.