I avoid going back through places where there’s too much poverty. I wouldn’t take nothing for the memories of what I went through—but I don’t want to go back to it. I remember being hungry too much. I think maybe it’s worse today, because people know they’re poor from watching television news and stuff. Back then, we didn’t know we were poor, and people were more proud then.
It bothers me to go back to Kentucky and see folks on welfare today because I know how hard my daddy worked to keep us alive during the Depression. Being poor really helped me. The country is making a big mistake by not teaching kids how to cook and raise a garden and build fires. It’s like the Indian taught the white man how to survive. Do you think our kids could take an ear of corn and beat it up fine to make bread? I’ve done it. And I could do it again.
2
Daddy
Daddy never took a handout,
We ate pinto beans and bacon,
But he worked to keep the wolf back from the door…
—“They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy,” by Jerry Chesnut
A few years ago, a fellow named Jerry Chesnut offered me a song called “They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy.” All I heard was the title, and I just knew I had to make that record, because that’s how I feel about my daddy, who died when he was a young man, around fifty-one years old. He had high blood pressure, and that worries me a lot because the doctors told me recently that I’ve got high blood pressure sometimes. Also, I have migraines, just like my daddy.
Even though he died before I ever got started singing, in 1959, I feel like Daddy’s been the most important person in my life. I’m very close to Mommy, too, and though Doolittle has just about raised me since I was a girl, I had almost fourteen years of Daddy giving me love and security, the way a daddy should. He’d sit and hold me on his lap while he rocked by the fireplace. I think Daddy is the main reason why I always had respect for myself when times got rough between me and Doolittle—I knew my daddy loved me.
My worst feelings in my life were over leaving Daddy to go west. I didn’t see him before he died, which makes me cry even today. I’ve often thought, if I could live my life over, I would tell him how much I loved him. Kids don’t tell their parents. It’s a shame, but it’s true. My kids don’t tell me that. I know they love me, but they don’t put it into words. So that’s what I try to do with some of my songs—to tell kids to love their parents while they’re still around.
That song that Jerry Chesnut wrote tells about my daddy, even though it’s about a great big man, and Daddy was only about five feet eight inches and weighed around 117 pounds.
We’ve got some pictures of Daddy, and he’s usually got this straight face on him, not much emotion. Mountain people are like that. It’s hard to read ’em if you don’t know ’em. He was real shy, not like people from the coal camps who are used to talking with each other. But Butcher Holler was his kind of world. There, he was the greatest man you ever saw. He could fix anything with those wiry arms of his. He could hammer up a well box, or a fence for the hog, or a new outhouse. You had to do things for yourself in the hollers or you’d die.
Daddy’s name was Melvin—Melvin Webb—but everybody called him “Ted.” His daddy and mommy lived in Butcher Holler; she was a Butcher, from the first family that settled up there. One of Daddy’s grandmothers was a full-blooded Cherokee squaw, and it’s the same on my mother’s side. So that means I’m one-quarter Cherokee—and proud of it. Other kids called me “half-breed” when I was a kid, but it didn’t bother me. Being Indian was no big deal one way or the other. A lot of blood was mixed up in the hollers, if the truth be known. I was always proud of being Indian—and I’ve gotten more proud as the years go on.
Daddy didn’t go to school much, but he could read and write some. He worked out-of-doors when he was young, farming and stuff. When he was about twenty, he met Mommy at the little church in the holler. They courted for around two years and then got married. They built their own little one-room wood cabin at the end of the holler. She would hold the boards and he would drive in the nails. Right after the Depression started, they began having kids—eight of them, four boys and four girls, in the next sixteen years. I was next to the oldest.
Daddy couldn’t get much work during the Depression, and we didn’t have money. I remember one Christmas when Daddy had only thirty-six cents for four children. Somehow, he managed to buy a little something for each of us down at the general store. He gave me a little plastic doll about three inches high, and I loved that like it was my own baby.
Daddy was more easygoing than Mommy. She did most of the correcting in the family. The only time Daddy would get mad was when someone would smart off at Mommy. Then he’d move right in there and settle it. He wasn’t one of those men that’s gone half the time, either—he didn’t have no bad habits. He was always teasing Mommy, but in a nice way. If she got mad about something, he’d laugh and say, “The squaw’s on the warpath tonight.” I never forgot that line, and I wrote a song about it when I got older. But you know, the nice way he treated her gave me ideas about the way I wanted to be treated. I still feel there’s better ways to handle a woman than whipping her into line. And I make that point clear in my songs, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Daddy was upset when he couldn’t find work in the lumber mills during the Depression. He was used to working hard. They didn’t have stuff like welfare checks in those days, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the WPA (somebody told me that stands for Work Projects Administration), which gave men jobs. This is why you go into homes back in Kentucky today and you’ll see pictures of FDR on the wall. Daddy would work a few days on the roads with a WPA crew and come home with a few dollars, as proud as could be. When he wasn’t working on the roads, he worked on his big garden and patched the house to get us through the Depression.
The WPA took care of me, too. The agent came up the holler and gave me a real “store-boughten” dress when I was around seven years old. Up to that time, all I wore was flour sacks Mommy sewed up as dresses. I kept looking at pictures in the Sears and Roebuck catalog and thinking how pretty everyone looked—but I never figured I’d get a chance to look pretty, too.
But one day this agent brought this little blue dress with pink flowers and dainty little pockets. Mercy, how I loved it. Daddy kept saying, “Don’t get your dress dirty.” I took good care of it and put it in the laundry bag, but we let our family hog run loose and he snatched that dress and just chewed it to pieces. Ruined it, he did. I must have cried for days.
When the Depression got better, Daddy saved enough money to buy a house with four rooms in it. It was down the holler, next to his folks, in a big, broad clearing. This is the family house you see in the pictures, with the high porch facing the garden and the hill rearing up behind the house. We had a spring out back for fresh water and a well in front. We had a new outhouse in the back. In the winter, you’d wait too long because you didn’t want to go outside in the cold. And then you’d have to run through the snow, hoping you’d make it to the outhouse. We still didn’t have electricity, and our bunch of kids still had to sleep on pallets in the living room at night. But we had four rooms instead of one, and we really thought we’d arrived.
Finally, the mines got to working again, and Daddy decided to support his family as a coal miner. He never worked in the mines before, and it must have taken a lot of nerve to go into that terrible dark hole. But Daddy did it for us.
He worked at Consolidated Number Five, right down the holler. The seam of coal was only three feet high, and you can bet they didn’t bother cutting the rock to give the men a place to stand up. That meant the miners had to crawl on their hands and knees and work on their sides or lying on their backs. Some of the miners wore knee pads, like the basketball players wear, but Daddy found that they raised him up so high that his back rubbed against the roof as he crawled into the mine. So he would come home every night with his knees all cut and sore, and he’d soak them in hot water bef
ore he could go to sleep. But the next morning he’d be out working in the garden again, until it was time to go to the mine.
Daddy worked the night shift. He left home around four o’clock every afternoon and walked down the holler. We kids, we hardly said good-bye to him. But looking back, I can see the worried look on Mommy’s face. She would keep busy with the kids all afternoon and evening. She had her hands full. But after we were in bed, she would sit by the kerosene lamp and read her Bible or an old Western book until she heard Daddy coming up the steps. They’d lie in bed talking, but I never heard him complain about the mines. Coal miners are funny that way. They don’t like to get their wives upset. I remember when that Hyden mine blew up in Kentucky on December 30, 1970, and I got myself in a big jam trying to raise money for those coal miners’ kids’ education—I’ll tell more about that later on in this book. Some of those widows testified later that their husbands had warned them about the dangerous blasting they were doing in the mine. But the wives knew enough not to ask any questions, or else their husbands would have been laid off. I feel real proud of Daddy for working in the mines. He kept his family alive by breaking his own body down. That’s the only way to look at it.
In the coal fields, you were never far from a disaster. When I was little, there was a big explosion in a mine above Van Lear that killed a lot of men. Other times, men would get killed in single accidents. I’ve walked past the mine when they were bringing out the men who were in a gas explosion. I remember all the women and children standing around, mostly crying. When I heard about the Hyden disaster, I could just picture those poor people huddled around a fire waiting for word about their men. That’s what life is like whenever your man is a coal miner. I guess that’s why I’m so soft on coal miners. I call my band “The Coal Miners,” and whenever I meet a guy at one of my concerts who says he was a coal miner, why, my eyes just get full of tears because I know how those men suffer.
Like I said before, my daddy had high blood pressure and migraine headaches. I’ve seen him walk the floor many a night, crying from the pain. But when you’re a kid, you don’t think about it. One time they wrapped Daddy up in an old quilt Mommy made out of overalls and took him down the holler on an old wooden sled. Somebody said to me, “Your daddy won’t be back.” I didn’t really understand what they meant. But after some time in the hospital, he came back. He couldn’t catch a cold or he’d get real sick. He’d get up every morning and light a fire, so he wouldn’t get sick. And when Daddy started getting that regular miner’s paycheck again, he would drag home groceries on a wooden sled he built himself.
After he worked in the mines for a few years, he had trouble breathing. The doctors used to say that a miner was “nervous” or that he smoked too much. They didn’t know about black lung in those days. Black lung is what you get when you breathe in too much coal dust. It never leaves your lungs—just stays there and clogs up your breathing, puts extra strain on your heart.
They used to tell the miners that coal dust was good for you, that it helped ward off colds. Or they’d tell a miner he would get sicker from dirty sheets than from working in a coal mine—lots of stupid things, but nobody knew any better then.
Sometimes Daddy didn’t take a bath before he came home, and all you could see was the whites of his eyes. Well, if that coal dust could stick to his face like that, it must have gotten into his lungs, too. But it wasn’t until some time after Daddy died that the miners just plumb refused to work unless the government paid them benefits. And all the time, England and other European countries were paying off their miners who had black lung. I’ve got relatives collecting black lung benefits today, but they came too late for Daddy. He got laid off when he couldn’t work fast anymore. They just said, “Take your shovel and go home.” No pension, no benefits, just “go home.” This was after I moved away, but Mommy wrote me a letter. They tried running a grocery store, but that didn’t work out because some people came down to get groceries but didn’t pay him. He left the world owing nobody anything, but a lot of people owed him.
A few years later, the company closed down the entire mine where Daddy worked: bricked it right over. But after I got into show business, I asked them to find my daddy’s old mining equipment. They had cemented all the old equipment inside the old bathhouse, but they broke in just for me and found an old carbide lamp and my cousin’s safety helmet, which I’m going to put in the museum on my ranch. But they never found Daddy’s old miner’s cap or his identification tag. I’m pretty superstitious about things like that and curious about what could have happened to his stuff.
I remember after World War II Daddy saved up enough money for a battery-operated Philco radio. I’ll never forget him pulling that radio up the holler on his sled and putting it in the corner of the living room, so proud of himself. It was the first radio we ever owned. I was eleven years old. Daddy didn’t let us run it all the time because he wanted to save the batteries for Saturday night, when he was off from work. He would sit there by the grate, where it was warm, and turn on Lowell Thomas and the news. I still hear that great deep voice of Lowell Thomas today, and it makes me think of Daddy. Then we’d get our favorite radio program of all—the Grand Ole Opry, direct from Nashville, Tennessee.
Music was always big in our family. My grandfather, Daddy’s father, played the banjo left-handed and we’d all sing. When he’d get drunk, he played it with his toes better than most people can with their fingers. But the Opry was something else. I’d sit on the floor and listen to Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Molly O’Day, who was the first woman singer I can remember. Mommy would do this little hoedown dance whenever Bill Monroe played his bluegrass music. I still do Mommy’s dance on my shows, kicking up my heels, hopping up and down like a squaw. I call it the “hillbilly hoedown.”
I can’t say that I had big dreams of being a star at the Opry. It was another world to me. All I knew was Butcher Holler—didn’t have no dreams that I knew about. But I’d curl up by Daddy and the radio and fall asleep, and on Sunday morning I’d find the radio still turned on, nothing playing, just some crackling noises. But inside my head I could still hear that music.
3
Mommy
Mommy scrubbed our clothes on a washboard every day.
Why I’ve seen her fingers bleed,
To complain, there was no need,
She’d smile in Mommy’s understanding way…
—“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” by Loretta Lynn
The first time I sang “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in public, I couldn’t finish the song. I just broke down and cried because they sneaked my mommy into the wings of the theater. Just seeing her tore me all to pieces, because I’ve always felt like a little kid compared to her.
To me, my mother always was the most beautiful woman in the world. A redheaded Irish girl was her mother and a half Cherokee was her father. So Mommy’s one-quarter Cherokee, with blue eyes and coal-black hair that’s just now turning gray. Her skin gets dark if she just works in the garden for an hour. Her eyes look Irish, but her cheekbones look Indian. I always wanted to be as beautiful as Mommy, but I never made it. She and I have the same nose, but I’ve got these buck teeth that I’ve always hated. I tell our little twins that if they ever need braces, I’ll find the money.
Mommy’s name is Clara, but in Butcher Holler they called her “Clary.” Me they called “Loretty.” Everybody’s name had to end with a y—that’s a hillbilly way. Mommy still calls me “Loretty.”
Mommy’s father was named Nathaniel Ramey, which was changed from the old Indian name of Raney. He came from Jenny’s Creek, named after Jenny Wiley, the white girl who was taken by the Indians, and now there’s a state park named after her. I think she’s kin to me somewhere back there.
Nathaniel Ramey used to stay with us sometimes—a quiet, proud man who never got a gray hair. He had twelve children by his first marriage and six by his second marriage, and he lived to be eighty-nine years old. We Cherokees are tough.
They didn’t used to teach much about Indian history in grade school, but I managed to hear about the Trail of Tears, named after the time the U.S. government made most of the Cherokee Nation leave our mountains and go all the way out west somewhere. Lots of ’em died on the way. When I found out what they did to my ancestors, I had a fit.
I used to respect Andrew Jackson until I found out how he pushed the Indians around. Since I moved to Nashville, I went out to his home, The Hermitage, just one time—and I won’t ever go back. He wasn’t on my side—why should I be on his?
Near my house in Hurricane Mills is a place where the Cherokees had to ford the Tennessee River on their Trail of Tears. There are times when I can almost feel and hear them squaws and their babies crying from hunger.
The way I see it, the white man came over here and said, “Look, we found us a new country.” But it wasn’t new. It belonged to the Indians, and it was taken away from them. From us. When I went to see that little Plymouth Rock in 1974, I read how the Indians taught the white man how to plant vegetables and build houses in that cold Massachusetts climate. If it wasn’t for the Indians, them Pilgrims would have all starved.
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