Loretta Lynn, Feisty First Lady of Country Music, Dies at 90

The acclaimed singer and songwriter ascended from a small Kentucky coal-mining community to national country music stardom.

Loretta Lynn Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Loretta Lynn, the acclaimed singer and songwriter whose ascent from a small Kentucky coal-mining community to national country music stardom became the stuff of Hollywood legend, has died. She was 90. 

In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. In May 2017, she suffered a stroke that ended her touring career.

Lynn’s life story was memorably told in the Michael Apted-directed Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) based on her 1976 memoir. Sissy Spacek won the best actress Oscar and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of the singer, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame since 1988.

“Today is a sad day,” Spacek said. “The world lost a magnificent human being. Loretta Lynn was a great artist, a strong and resilient country music pioneer and a precious friend. I am heartbroken.”

Survivors include younger sister (and fellow country star) Crystal Gayle.

Beyond the dramatic particulars of her life, Lynn, who recorded 16 No. 1 country singles and won three Grammy Awards, was among music’s groundbreaking female singing stars.

She became one of the industry’s brightest luminaries in an era when men dominated country. She wrote much of her hit material, and it was sharply penned, crafted from the point of view of a woman (usually a married one) who would take no guff from her man. And she did not shrink from controversial subject matter.

She was born Loretta Webb on April 14, 1932, in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. “I’m always making Butcher Hollow sound like it’s the most backward part of the United States — and I think maybe it is,” she wrote in her autobiography.

The second eldest of coal miner Melvin Webb’s eight children, she grew up in sometimes dire poverty in the heart of the Great Depression. One of the few distractions she had was the radio; 11-year-old Loretta became enamored of the Grand Ole Opry and its early female star, Molly O’Day.

At age 15, she married Oliver Lynn, known by his nicknames “Doolittle” and “Mooney.” A year later, the couple moved from Kentucky to Custer, Washington, a town of a few hundred near Bellingham. By 18, Lynn had four children. (Two more would follow.)

Encouraged by her husband, Lynn began singing in Washington clubs. In 1950, Don Grashey of tiny Zero Records arranged a session for her in Los Angeles. Backed by top-flight guitarists Speedy West and Roy Lanham, she cut her composition “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” inspired in part by Kitty Wells’ 1952 hit “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

With tireless promotion by the country neophyte, the song became a surprise hit, and Lynn was soon touring with the Wilburn Brothers and appearing on the Grand Ole Opry. She was signed by the major label Decca Records in 1961, and the title of her first top 10 hit for the company harbingered the rest of her career: “Success.”

A run of chart-topping country singles followed, sung in a warm voice but taking a tough-minded stance. Just the names of many of these hits telegraph Lynn’s point of view: “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (No. 2, 1966), “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (No. 1, 1966), “What Kind of a Girl (Do You Think I Am?)” (No. 5, 1967), “Fist City” (No. 1, 1968) and “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath” (No. 3, 1968).

Other signature tunes by Lynn took an autobiographical tack; these included 1965’s “Blue Kentucky Girl” (memorably covered by Emmylou Harris) and 1970’s No. 1 single “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

In 1971 — the year she charted her biggest solo hit, “One’s on the Way” — Lynn began a productive collaboration with labelmate Conway Twitty. The pair’s No. 1 duet “After the Fire Is Gone” was followed by a dozen more top 10 country singles.

In 1975, as the national debate over women’s liberation continued to roil, Lynn incited comment with her song “The Pill.” The tune, which reached No. 5 on the country chart, was, in her words, “about how the man keeps the woman barefoot and pregnant over the years.” It was one of the best examples of the no-nonsense spunk of her songwriting.

Lynn continued to chart records through the ’80s, but her recording career slowed and then stopped.

She re-entered the scene at age 70 in 2004 through the agency of an unlikely fan and collaborator: Jack White, then of the popular Detroit garage-punk act The White Stripes. They teamed on the Interscope album Van Lear Rose, which was designed to reignite her career just as Johnny Cash’s series of American Records albums had returned him to prominence.

The album became the biggest of her career, and the Lynn-White duet “Portland Oregon” received serious radio play.