When a headline in The New York Times calls you a “symbol of rural resilience,” you were more than a singer, songwriter and a coal miner’s daughter. That was Loretta Lynn, who died in her sleep Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, her family told The Associated Press. She was 90 years old.
“Her powerful voice, playful lyrics and topical songs were a model for generations of country singers and songwriters. So was her life story,” says the Times’ subhead, under which Bill Friskics-Warren writes: “Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. … She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom.”
Lynn began her career in 1958. Songs like “Coal Miner’s Daughter” reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky upbringing and “she crafted a persona of a defiantly tough woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers,” writes AP’s Kristin Hall. “She was the first woman ever named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.
“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too,” Lynn told the AP in 2016. “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”
“Her songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters,” Friskics-Warren writes. “Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: ‘She’s got everything it takes/to take everything you’ve got,” she sang in ‘Everything It Takes,’ one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.”
The Academy of Country Music named Lynn the artist of the decade for the 1970s and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, her husband of nearly 50 years, died in 1996. They had six children, 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.
