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VOL. 15 NO. 7 SEPTEMBER 2015
Loretta Lynn How the Country Superstar Got Her Start in Washington State
Loretta Lynn’s life story is a rags-to-riches tale familiar to fans around the world. She journeyed from the poverty of the Kentucky hills to the backwoods of Washington State and on to Nashville superstardom. To this day, Loretta Lynn maintains an active touring schedule along with her status as an “honest-to-goodness” American icon.
L
oretta Lynn charmed her way onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on the tails of her 1960 debut single, I’m a Honky Tonk Girl, but she actually got her start in the taverns and grange halls of Washington State’s northwest corner.
writes Lynn in her 2002 memoir, Still Woman Enough. “Doo had been to Washington when he was younger, and the way he talked it was God’s country…where the air is pure.” Loretta joined him in 1951, traveling across the country at age 14, seven months pregnant with her first child. Poverty didn’t leave the couple behind when they left Appalachia. She writes of times when Doo would be gone looking for work, “I remember he’d go off for days at a time after we got to Washington, leaving me and my babies alone. Well, one of those times we got down to where we was eating mostly dandelion greens.” But she also As millions who read her 1976 remembers the kindness and generosity autobiography or saw its Oscar winning of her neighbors, who helped her out 1980 film treatment are aware, Loretta time and time again. Lynn is a Coal Miner’s “Before I Daughter who was raised was singing, I in dire poverty in Butcher cleaned house; I Holler, Kentucky. Butcher took in laundry; Holler was so small that I cooked for there wasn’t so much as ranch hands; I a dirt road to serve the picked berries. remote Appalachian I worked seven hamlet. days a week. I Yet despite the poverty, was a housewife Lynn was surrounded by and mother love and by music as a for 15 years child. before I was She famously married an entertainer. Loretta at age nine, courtesy Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn And it wasn’t Loretta Lynn collection when she was a barelylike being a schooled child of 13. housewife today. “Doo” was a 21-year-old war veteran It was doing hand laundry on a board with a reputation as a hell-raiser. and cooking on an old coal stove. I Looking for a future that didn’t require grew a garden and canned what I grew.” him to work the mines, Doo found farm By 18, she had four children (two work near Custer, Washington. “Doo more, twins, came along in 1964). heard of work in Washington State, Isolated from her family back home where his dad was panning for gold… and burdened with domestic work, she he decided to go hell or high water,” turned to music for solace. Doo heard her singing at her chores and declared that she sounded just as good as anyone he heard on the radio. For her 18th birthday, he bought her a $17 guitar and told her to learn how to play it. “After he got me the guitar, I went out and bought a Country Song Roundup. I looked at the songs Loretta with brother Jay Lee and Roland Smiley. She formed her own band, Loretta’s Trail Blazers, while still living in Washington in there and thought,
“Coal Miner’s Daughter” Loretta Lynn got her start as a performer in the taverns and grange halls of northwest Washington
‘Well, this ain’t nothing. Anybody can their front man Howard Roedell. I told do this.’ I just wrote about things that Doo I didn’t want no job singing in happened. I was having babies and front of people. I argued and cried and staying at home. I was writing about carried on, but Doo got his way, just life,” she recalled. like he always did.” Those early shows “It seemed like we got worse off as were painful for her. “I sang into the the years went by in Washington. We microphone and looked at my feet. lived in three different houses there. After every song, I turned my back to Who knows, maybe the fact that we the crowd.” seemed to Joyce be going Olmstead, downhill whose father is what got Howard Doo thinking Roedell was about me lead singer singing for for The money. I Westerners, know this: recalls those without days. “Loretta Doo and his and the band drive to get would practice a better life, at my house. there would They would have been no make tapes and Loretta Lynn, take them to Loretta on set with Sissy Spacek. Sissy portrayed country the Bellingham Loretta in “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” singer.” radio stations,” - courtesy Loretta Lynn collection Doo says Joyce, began pushing her to perform. “Shy who also babysat Loretta’s four little isn’t the word for what I felt onstage,” kids. “I remember once they had a live wrote Loretta. “Terrified is more like broadcast. Loretta would be singing and it. But Doo came home one day and playing her guitar, dressed in a black said he’d got me a job. He’d gone and and white cowgirl shirt and wearing a got me a job singing inside a tavern in white hat.” Joyce liked Loretta. “She Blaine, right on the Canadian border. was really nice. She’s down-to-earth I’d never been inside a tavern and I’d and plain out nice, with no pretensions, never sang in public. I was going to one of those people who would give be singing with the Penn Brothers and their group The Westerners, with continued on page 18