Coal Miner's Daughter
Page 1
Copyright © 1976, 2010 by Loretta Lynn; renewed 2020 by Loretta Lynn Enterprises, Inc., along with new material
Reading Group Guide Copyright © 2021 by Loretta Lynn Enterprises, Inc., and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo. Cover photo courtesy of The Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum. Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Originally published by Henry Regnery Co. in 1976.
First Grand Central Publishing Edition: February 2021
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All photographs in insert 1 are from the personal collection of Loretta Lynn, except where otherwise noted (copyright Loretta Lynn).
All photos in insert 2 are courtesy of the Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum, except where otherwise noted.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lynn, Loretta, author.
Title: Coal miner's daughter / Loretta Lynn.
Description: First Grand Central Publishing Edition. | New York: Grand
Central Publishing, 2021. | Summary: "Reissued for the 40th Anniversary
of the Oscar-winning, Sissy Spacek-starring film of the same name, COAL
MINER'S DAUGHTER recounts Loretta Lynn's astonishing journey to become
one of the original queens of country music. Loretta grew up dirt poor
in the mountains of Kentucky, she was married at fifteen years old, and
became a mother soon after. At the age of twenty-four, her husband, Doo,
gave her a guitar as an anniversary present. Soon, she began penning
songs and singing in front of honky-tonk audiences, and, through years
of hard work, talent, and true grit, eventually made her way to
Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry, eventually securing her place in country
music history. Loretta's prolific and influential songwriting made her
the first woman to receive a gold record in country music, and got her
named the first female Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music
Association. This riveting memoir introduces readers to all the highs
and lows on her road to success and the tough, smart, funny, and
fascinating woman behind the legend"-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030170 | ISBN 9781538701713 (trade paperback) | ISBN
9781538701690 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lynn, Loretta. | Country musicians--United
States--Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC ML420.L947 A3 2021 | DDC 782.421642092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030170
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-0171-3 (trade pbk.), 978-1-5387-0169-0 (ebook)
E3-20210121-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the New Edition
About Me and This Book
1: Butcher Holler
2: Daddy
3: Mommy
4: Family Style
5: School Days
6: The Pie Social
7: Doolittle
8: Hey, You Ain’t Supposed to Wear Clothes under Your Nightgown
9: Doo Kicks Me Out
10: Two Thousand Miles from Home
11: A Death in the Family
12: Beginner’s Luck
13: An Honest-to-Goodness Record
14: Fans
15: The Education of a Country Singer
16: Music City, U.S.A.
17: Patsy
18: My Kids
19: Performer
20: Songwriter
21: We Bought the Whole Town
22: Me and Doo
23: The Hyden Widows
24: The Truth about My Health
25: Mexico
26: Entertainer of the Year
27: Death Threats
28: Baptized at Last
29: Confessions of a Bug
30: On the Road
31: What’s Next?
What Came Next: Forty More Years with Loretta Lynn 32: The View from the Mountain Top
33: Locking Horns
34: My Work Husband (Conway Twitty)
35: True Love
36: Angels
37: Sloe Gin Fizz (Jack White)
38: Fake News
Acknowledgments
Photos
Discover More
Also by Loretta Lynn
Reading Group Guide
To My Husband Doo. Always.
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Preface to the New Edition
It’s been over forty years since the book you hold in your hands was released. First it was a best-selling book; then it was an Oscar-winning movie. Forty years.
To me, that feels like yesterday.
Today I’m eighty-eight years old. Who’d have thought I’d live to be this old? I sure didn’t. My daddy had a stroke when he was just fifty-one—and I got kids older than that!
Lately I think a lot about the past. My memories are as real to me as the minute I’m living in now. When I think about people I’ve loved who have already passed, my heart fills up and the memories just start to pour. That’s the way I felt when me and my daughter decided to write about my good friend Patsy Cline here lately. I’d been talking about Patsy a lot and my daughter said, “Momma, we’ve got to write some of this down.” I knew she was right. Patsy was my best friend. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what I’d have done. Me and her made a great team.
While we were writing the book that became Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust, our editor asked me questions like, “Did that happen in kindergarten or third grade?” or “What color was that couch?” I told her, “Honey, I don’t know. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you just try and remember back that far!” Some things you just know and some things, well, who cares?
Fortunately, a lot of my memories have been preserved. Lord knows I’ve done thousands of interviews over the years, so there’s plenty of articles, videos, and even books where I’ve told a lot about my life. Plus, I keep near about everything. My kids accuse me of being a hoarder, whatever that means. Growing up poor, in the Depression, I learned to hold on to things. So, all my life I’ve been saving things from my fans, from my travels, and from my career. Clothes, letters, cards, furniture, awards, little presents from all over the world—you name it, I got it.
About twenty years
ago we got serious and built a big, beautiful museum out near my house so fans who visit have somewhere to go and learn about my life and career. Tim Cobb designed it. We call it the Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum. It’s out on my property in Hurricane Mills, right across from the replica of the house I grew up in that they built for the Coal Miner’s Daughter movie. You can go inside and walk around. It’s fully furnished and looks just like it did when I was growing up, right down to the cup of tea sitting there on the kitchen table where my momma used to read tea leaves. You can walk from there over to my museum. It’s big—18,000 square feet! Inside I’ve got a bunch of my stage outfits—from the very first stage dress I ever made to my ball gowns, all my awards, and every single one of my records. The whole place is real interactive, so you can walk onto my first tour bus and see a replica of the one-room schoolhouse I used to go to back in Kentucky. I’ve featured special friends and family, like Conway Twitty, my sister Crystal Gayle, and of course, Patsy Cline. There’s always something new to see ’cause Tim keeps the displays fresh. People say it rivals Graceland—it’s just farther out in the country, just like me.
Even in a place this size, we still don’t have room to show everything. Tim went back into storage the other day to find a dress Barbra Streisand gave me. He’s got everything cataloged and real orderly and knows where everything is. He hauled out a bunch of big old scrapbooks. Boy, those things just took me back to 1975. They’d been in a closet in the big house for years, but then we had a house fire when a candle tipped over on the porch. I burned my hand trying to put that thing out with a pillow. Anyway, I guess somebody’d rescued them and moved them and I never even paid much attention. I pulled back the cover of one and I could smell the smoke. The pages stuck together, singed around the edges. Inside were hundreds of clippings—interviews and articles about me. I’d forgotten most all of them, to tell the truth. But what about took my breath away were the odds and ends that I had tucked in there, too, like a handwritten note from my dear friend, country music legend Ernest Tubb, a program from a White House dinner, and an invitation to the Oscars. Those little mementos took me right back.
So, I got to thinking we might take a look back at Coal Miner’s Daughter, maybe give it an update. After you read this new edition, you’ll find some new materials we added there at the end. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you.
Loretta Lynn
Hurricane Mills, Tennessee
April 2020
About Me and This Book
Well, I look out the window and what do I see?
The breeze is a-blowin’ the leaves from the trees
Everything is free—everything but me…
—“I Wanna Be Free,” by Loretta Lynn
I bloodied my husband’s nose the other night. I didn’t know I was doing it—I just woke up at three in the morning, and Doolittle was holding a towel to his nose. He told me I sat straight up, in my sleep, yelling, “Do you see this ring? Do you see this ring?” And I was a-throwing my hands around until my fingers dug into his nose.
“Loretta, what in the world were you talking about?” Doo asked me.
I said I was dreaming about some old guy that tried to make a date with me when I first started singing. I didn’t have no ring at the time—we were too poor for that kind of stuff—but now in my dream I was showing that old buzzard I had a ring.
What does it mean when you carry on in your sleep like that? Somebody said it means you’ve got something on your mind. I said, “I know that.” I ain’t got much education, but I got some sense.
To me, this talking is almost like I’ve got things inside me that never came out before. Usually, when something is bothering me, I write a song that tells my feelings, like, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).” That’s really about me and my marriage.
I’ve still got things inside me—sad things, happy things—that people don’t know about. I’ve had so many changes in my life, and I feel like there’s more to come. I’m superstitious; I believe in reincarnation and extrasensory perception; and I’ve got this feeling about more changes in my life. It’s like a girl feels when her body starts to grow up, or a woman feels when a baby starts to grow inside her. You know it’s there; you feel the stirrings, but it’s deeper than words.
People know the basic facts about me—how I was married when I wasn’t quite fourteen and had four babies by the time I was eighteen. Sometimes my husband tells me, “I raised you the way I wanted you to be.” And it’s true. I went from Daddy to Doo, and there’s always been a man telling me what to do.
I was just a kid—didn’t know nothing—picking strawberries in the fields with my babies on a blanket, under an umbrella. I’d change a few diapers, my fingers all rough and dirty, give ’em a few bottles, and go back to picking. So when I sing those country songs about women struggling to keep things going, you could say I’ve been there.
It’s like that hit record I had in 1975, “The Pill,” about this woman who’s taking birth control pills so she won’t have no more babies. Well, they didn’t have none of them pills when I was younger, or I’d have been swallowing ’em like popcorn. See, the men who run some of the radio stations, they banned the record because they didn’t like what I was saying. But the women knew. Like I say, I know what it’s like to be pregnant and nervous and poor.
Now I’ve got this huge ranch in Tennessee, and I’ve been on the cover of Newsweek magazine, and I was the first woman ever named Entertainer of the Year in country music. I also got honorable mention in the Gallup poll as one of the “most admired women” in the United States. Lordy, I even got to meet Gregory Peck!
But some of my friends who know me best say they wouldn’t trade places with me for a million dollars because of the pace I lead. I’m still a-traveling nearly two hundred nights a year to meet my fans who’ve given me everything I’ve got. In one way, I’m still working as hard as when I was working in the fields. But I’d have to admit the stakes are higher.
When I first came to Nashville, people called us “hillbilly singers” and hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could. Now country music is a big business. You go around the country, there’s a thousand radio stations broadcasting our music. Why, they’ve even got a country station in New York City, where I played in that big building—what’s it called, some kind of garden? Yeah, Madison Square Garden, that’s right. So I’ve seen country music go uptown, like we say, and I’m proud I was there when it happened.
They’ve also made a movie called Nashville that people tell me was one of the biggest movies of 1975. Well, I ain’t seen it, so I can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not. I don’t follow the movies much, and I’d much rather see a Walt Disney movie if I do go.
But some of my friends told me there’s two characters in there that resemble me and Doolittle—at least somewhat. Well, I met that girl who played the top country singer in the movie. She came to Nashville and talked to me and watched me perform for a few weeks. If she tried to imitate me in the movie, that’s their problem. If they really wanted me, why didn’t they just ask me?
But I ain’t worrying about no movies. My records are still selling, and I get more offers for shows than I can handle. So if you’re wondering whether that character in the movie is me, it ain’t. This book is me. I’ve got my own life to lead.
And my life hasn’t been easy, not even now. I’ve had chest surgery (nonmalignant, thank God) and blood poisoning, and sometimes I pass out on stage from migraine headaches. You hear all kinds of rumors about my sick spells, and also some rumors about me having trouble with aspirin pills. It wasn’t what people thought—but I’ll get to that later.
Also, I’ve had a bunch of death threats that we managed to keep secret. For a while, there was one or two people following me around until the police got ’em. Now I’ve got people protecting me all the time. Growing up in eastern Kentucky
like I did, I’m used to having a few guns around to protect me (not that I’m crazy about waking up in the morning and seeing Doolittle’s pistol right there on the dressing table).
You’ve heard my husband’s name is “Mooney,” right? Well, I call him “Doolittle” because that’s his old Kentucky nickname. Everybody else calls him “Mooney,” which is what they called him in Washington State when they found out he used to run moonshine.
You’ll hear a lot of stories about Doolittle if you hang around Nashville long enough. Some of ’em are true and some of ’em ain’t. Doo is a smart man in a lot of ways. We’ve been married for more than twenty-five years, but we’ve still got some problems that I don’t know if we’ll ever straighten out.
When we started on this book, me and Doolittle talked it over about how much we should tell about ourselves. Suppose I don’t like the way he acts when he’s drinking. Or suppose Doo thinks I’m meaner than a snake. Should we tell our troubles to other people in a book?
Well, Doo leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a minute. Then he said, “Hell’s fire, Loretta, just tell the story the way it happened. I’ve always said you should never try to cover up things. Look, we’re not perfect. Let’s not pretend we are.”
I agree with that. Nobody’s perfect. The only one that ever was, was crucified. And sometimes I think our problems are made worse by the kind of business we’re in.
Doo don’t really like to be cooped up. He’d rather be out on the ranch, training his bird dogs, and I don’t blame him. Heck, I don’t like being cooped up either, only it seems that’s what my life has become.
It’s a strange deal. I’m supposed to be a country singer, writing songs about marriage and family and the way normal folks live. But mostly I’m living in motel rooms and traveling on my special bus with my private bedroom in the back. I don’t even open the shades in my bus anymore. I’ve seen every highway in the United States by now, and they all look alike to me.
Playing these road shows is a weird experience. One minute I’m out on that stage, usually dressed in my long-sleeved, floor-length gowns, with my hair hanging down to my shoulders, smiling at my fans. There’s such a feeling of love between me and those people. I know it shows on my face. Being onstage is the best part of my career. I just say whatever comes into my head, and I joke with my band, and we all have a good time. It’s the only time when I really feel grown-up and in control of things.