Coal Miner's Daughter

by Coal Miner's Daughter (Expanded

  We sat around and talked for a few hours in their office. There were four brothers from Arkansas—Doyle, Teddy, Leslie, and Lester. I remember Doyle liked my voice, and Teddy thought I sounded like Kitty Wells. Doyle did most of the business, and Teddy was a songwriter. They also ran a talent agency.

  They asked me if I was under contract to anybody else. I remember Mr. Burley had promised to let me out of the contract if I moved to Nashville. I called him and he said, “Go ahead and sign. I’m tearing up your contract with me.” He was a sweet old man and I think he was as happy as we were about the Wilburn deal.

  That was the start of a relationship that brought me a lot of happiness—but ended in a lot of pain. I really got close to the Wilburns and their mother—I still call her “Mom” today. For a long time, they managed my career and were also my song publishers. But around 1970, I got the feeling they weren’t growing with me anymore. So I went out and formed my own company. There’s a big court case still going on, so my lawyers have told me I can’t make any comments about the Wilburns, or why I left them.

  It isn’t easy for me to hold back on my feelings, but when your lawyer talks, you’d better listen. But I’ve got to say this much: the Wilburns were good for me, when I was getting started. In my house in Hurricane Mills, I’ve got a portrait of the Wilburns where everybody can see it. If you’ll notice in my fan booklets and stuff, there is usually a picture of those two boys entitled simply “Doyle and Teddy.” You can’t ever go back to what used to be, but you can be honest and remember it.

  Anyway, the way it started, Doyle and Teddy took me to their recording studio, called Sure-Fire, where I recorded a song called “Fool Number One.” They figured I might as well start at the top, so they took the “demo” record to Owen Bradley at Decca Records.

  Owen Bradley is one of the biggest men in the business. He was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1974. He talks like an easygoing country man, but he’s been responsible for more country music hits than anybody. He was polite to the Wilburns when they brought in my record, but he said I sounded too much like Kitty Wells, which I probably did. Since he already had Kitty herself and Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee at Decca, he didn’t need me.

  But Owen said he wanted that song for Brenda Lee, who was just a kid at the time. And Doyle said, “Owen, I’m not pitching you a song, I’m pitching you an artist.” So Owen agreed to give me a six-month contract if Doyle would let Brenda record the song. It got to be a big hit for her, and things worked out for me, too.

  Decca started to call me “The Decca Doll from Kentucky.” I remember my first recording session for them. I was gonna record “The Girl That I Am Now” and “I Walked Away from the Wreck.” I was so scared I just stood in the background and was even afraid to speak to the musicians. I’d see those fabulous side musicians like Grady Martin and Floyd Cramer, guys the public doesn’t know but who are really superstars for making a singer sound good. I’d get so choked up I couldn’t sing.

  But Owen would put up a screen, so I couldn’t see nobody; I’d just sing to myself. He said he did the same thing for Brenda Lee and it helped.

  I always felt like Owen was a father to me. He could see I was just a scared little country girl, and he made me relax. I remember one time, after we signed, we didn’t have any money. I started crying in his office, and he gave me a thousand dollars out of his pocket, not from the company, to pay my rent and the back bills. The next year we were making some money, and we paid Owen back. But I ain’t never forgotten that man helping me like he did.

  Owen gave me good advice lots of times. Doyle and Teddy were trying to polish me up, make me a “performer,” while Owen felt I should stay more natural. They were both right, in their own ways, but it was nice to have somebody say, “Just pronounce the words the way you want, Loretta.” That’s what Owen told me. He never made me feel like I was a dumb hillbilly just because I said “ain’t” or “holler.” Owen said people would always understand me, so long as I was myself.

  Once we had the contracts with the Wilburns and Decca, we knew we could make it in Nashville. I wouldn’t have stayed if I didn’t think I was going to make it. You’ve got to go all the way. Doolittle had already closed up our house in Washington State, and we moved the four kids to Indiana, where both of our mothers were living.

  It was tough leaving Washington. Blanche Smith was upset because she said my four kids kept her young. She said, “I’m not going to live if you take away my babies.” She was an old lady at the time, and sure enough, she died about six months after we moved. I still miss Bob and Clyde Green. Every holiday, I start crying just thinking about those eleven years when Blanche and those two boys were as close as family. I see the Greens once in a while, and we talk over the old days.

  Another bad thing was saying good-bye to my musicians. My brother Jay Lee was going to move to Nashville with us, but I couldn’t bring those other boys down. There was no way I could pay ’em a salary. I think it just about broke the heart of my steel man, Smiley, because I don’t believe he ever played in a band again.

  It was the fall of 1961 when we settled in Nashville. Me and Doolittle were staying with a woman named Faye Walton, who lives around Indianapolis now. I once got a letter from her, bawling me out for not giving her enough credit. Well, it was true—she used to help us out a lot. So if you’ve bought a copy of this book, Faye, thanks a lot.

  Doolittle went to work in a shop, but he was only taking cars he could fix in his spare time. He was starting to travel with me and was taking an interest in the business. Before the year was out, I was named Most Promising Female Singer, and Decca was talking about lengthening my contract.

  It looked like we were gonna have it easy in Nashville. But then I learned not everybody was on my side.

  17

  Patsy

  Someone said that time heals sorrow

  But I can’t help but dread tomorrow,

  When I miss you more today than yesterday…

  —“I Miss You More Today,” by Loretta Lynn and Lorene Allen

  Once we were living in Nashville, we began to get regular dates, and I found myself being invited back to the Opry week after week. But then I ran into some jealousy, and if it wasn’t for Patsy Cline, I don’t think I would have lasted.

  It seems there were a lot of girl singers who were trying to get to the top at the same time. When I came along, they got jealous and started complaining at the Opry because I got invited back so much. Then they started telephoning me and saying I ought to go back to the West Coast.

  One girl asked me who I was sleeping with to get on the Opry so fast. It hurt so much that I cried day and night. My husband said, “If you don’t quit this crying, I’m gonna take you back to the West Coast and forget it.” And he would have.

  But that’s when I met Patsy. She was around twenty-seven, and she’d known plenty of hard times trying to make it. Just after I got to Nashville, she was in a car accident that almost killed her. I was on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop radio show that they do every Saturday night, and I said, “Patsy has the number one record, ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ and she’s in the hospital.” Patsy heard it and asked her husband, Charlie Dick, to bring me to the hospital. She was all bandaged up. We talked a good while and became close friends right away. From then on, if she had a fight with her husband, she’d call me. If I had a fight with Doolittle, I’d call her.

  The main reason we became good friends was we were both struggling. Patsy had gotten cut out of a lot of money on a couple of her hit songs, and now she was in the hospital all banged up. We both felt we wouldn’t try to hurt each other.

  I guess the other girls didn’t know about me and Patsy being friends. They called a party at one of their homes to discuss how to stop me from being on the Opry, and they invited Patsy! There were about six of them, younger ones just coming up. I’m not saying who they were, but they know it themselves. The only thing I will say is that Kitty Wells wasn’t one of them. She’s alw
ays been my idol, and she was on the road at the time. Plus, she’s too good and religious a person to do what the others did. Anyway, inviting Patsy was their mistake. She called me up and told me what the deal was and said we both should go to that meeting. I said I didn’t have anything to wear, and besides the meeting was about me. She said going was the best thing to do. She told me to get my hair done, and she came over to my house with a new outfit she had bought for me and she made me go.

  When we got to the house, there were all these Cadillacs belonging to the top women singers in the country. We went in there, and they didn’t say a word. That ended their plan. Patsy put the stamp of approval on me, and I never had any problems with them again. In fact, they are all my friends now. But I made a point of it when new girls came along to give ’em all a chance, because I wouldn’t treat nobody the way they treated me. If you’re good, you’re gonna make it.

  Me and Patsy got closer together all the time. She taught me a lot of things about show business, like how to go onto a stage and how to get off. She even bought me a lot of clothes. Many times when she bought something for herself, she would buy me the same thing. She gave me rhinestones—I thought they were real diamonds—and I still have the dresses she bought me, hanging in my closet. She gave me one pair of panties I wore for three years. They were holier than I am!

  She even bought curtains and drapes for my house because I was too broke to buy them. And she offered to pay me to go on the road with her just to keep her company. She was a great human being and a great friend.

  Patsy loved to cook, and she’d call me up all the time to come over and eat something. Or she would come over to our house and eat rabbit, when Doo shot some. That’s the one thing she loved. Remembering nice things about her, it makes me mad when people say bad things about Patsy. One singer was quoted in some article last year as saying Patsy was “a beer drinker and a cusser, which she got from coming up in a hard life, but she was mostly a good-hearted person.” Well, I never saw Patsy drink too much beer or cuss much more than an ordinary woman, but it was certainly true she was a warm-hearted person, and she ain’t around to defend herself, so I’d rather remember the good part about her.

  Patsy was a good old country girl from Winchester, Virginia. I didn’t know it at the time, but her real name was Virginia Patterson Hensley. She started as a dancer but turned to singing, and she worked some mighty rough places. The first time people ever heard of her she was on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1957 singing this song “Walking after Midnight.” She drove ’em wild with that song. Then she did songs like “Crazy,” “She’s Got You,” “Faded Love,” “Leaving,” “On Your Mind,” and “I Fall to Pieces,” one after another. She was really like Hank Williams, the way she got this throb in her voice and really touched people’s emotions.

  I remember the last time I saw Patsy alive. It was in Nashville on a Thursday. She came over to my house to hang drapes. Now, that year she was named Top Female Singer, replacing Kitty Wells. At this ceremony she told me I would be named number one singer next year. I told her she was wrong, that she’d be number one for years to come. Now, imagine the Most Promising Female Singer and the Top Female Singer hanging drapes. Pretty wild bunch, wouldn’t you say? Those drapes are now in Doolittle’s office. I’m gonna put ’em in my museum that I’m putting in the mill back home.

  Later that same Thursday night, I went over to Patsy’s house because she had some tapes she wanted me to hear from a recording session. At that session she cut “Sweet Dreams.”

  I remember that while we listened to the tapes, Patsy embroidered a tablecloth. She did that to relax. Her little boy Randy was on a rocking horse, rocking very hard. I was worried that he’d fall off and get hurt, but Patsy said not to worry. That night we made plans to go shopping when she returned from doing the benefit show in Kansas City for some disc jockey who had gotten hurt in a wreck.

  Just before I left her house about midnight, she said she had something for me. Then she gave me a great big box filled with clothes for me to take home. One thing in that box was a little, red, sexy shorty nightgown. She told me, “This is the sexiest thing I’ve ever had. Red is the color men like.” I never did wear that nightgown, though. I’m gonna put that in my museum. (Maybe I just might wear it one of these days—just for my old man, of course. It’s made out of two small Band-Aids and one a little bigger.)

  I remember that before we said good-bye, we’d usually hug each other, but that night I was carrying that huge box. Patsy said. “Aren’t you going to hug me?” I put down the box and hugged her. Then came the last words I would hear from her. She said, “Little gal, no matter what people say or do, no matter what happens, you and me are gonna stick together.”

  On Tuesday evening, March 5, 1963, Patsy, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes, the pilot, were flying home from the Kansas City benefit, in a twin-engine Comanche, when they ran into a storm near Dyersburg, near where I live today. On Wednesday morning I wondered why I didn’t hear from Patsy. I was gonna call her up and say, “You lazy-head, why ain’t you here?” Just then, I got a call from Patsy’s booking agent, who told me she was dead. I said, “Baloney, her and me is going shopping.” Then I realized it was true. The radio said her plane was missing, and finally they announced the news that there were no survivors.

  That just about broke me up, to think that someone as good as that was gone. And I guess I was selfish enough to mourn almost as much for myself as for her. I was upset because who would I turn to? Patsy was like a mother and a sister to me. When she died, I just about gave up. I thought this was the end for me, too.

  They brought four maroon hearses to carry the caskets; then the caskets were put in a large room. Each of the caskets had a picture of the artist on it. Just two days later, Jack Anglin was killed going to a memorial service for Patsy. Me and Doo also just missed being killed by a train at a crossing. We wondered what in the world was going on; it was such a sad, scary time.

  The thing that kept me going was remembering how Patsy had told me she was gonna stick with me no matter what. I’ve always felt that Patsy was helping me with my career, even from beyond. I know that she tries to guide me. I feel she’s here. You have to have ESP to feel it, but I know she’s here. It wasn’t but another year before I was named Top Female Singer, just like Patsy predicted.

  I still think about Patsy a lot. I won’t go anywhere near the place where the plane crashed. I named one of my twins after her. I’ve often thought about doing an album of her songs, but I never have because I know I’d start to cry. I’ve got all her albums and tapes. I think about the way she would hold out one arm, real ladylike, but I can’t be like that. I’ll imitate other singers sometimes. I started by imitating Kitty Wells, a real serious Christian lady who won’t hardly joke around onstage. But there’s something about Patsy I can’t imitate, and I won’t try. To me, Patsy was my best friend and I couldn’t imitate her. It would hurt too much.

  18

  My Kids

  Little handprints on the wall,

  Little footsteps in the hall,

  Little arms that reach out for me in the night…

  —“One Little Reason,” by Loretta Lynn

  Things got better for me after meeting Patsy. But I don’t know if things got better for my kids. They were used to me being around to guide ’em, and now when they were growing up, I wasn’t there.

  Even today, with my four older kids in their twenties, I see signs that it wasn’t good for me to leave ’em alone so much. They all live right close to our ranch, and I’m always getting involved in their troubles. Half the time I worry that I didn’t know ’em well enough when they were young. The other half I worry that I’m too involved now. It’s a pretty emotional subject with me—how I wasn’t around when my kids needed me.

  Sometimes when I get all worked up over their problems, Doo says we should just let the kids work it out for themselves. But when I’m home, I’m tempted to be an old moth
er hen. It’s a funny deal. In country music, we’re always singing about home and family. But because I was in country music, I had to neglect my home and family.

  I look at Betty and Jack and Ernest and Cissy today, and I think of how I went out on the road. We had this dream about me making it in show business—and it’s paid off, in money and other things. But in certain ways, I don’t know.

  At first, Doolittle stayed with the kids a lot. While we were still living in Washington, he’d cook their dinners and take ’em places like the drive-in movies. He’s always been a good father with his kids. He taught ’em to survive and be independent. But when he joined me on the road, we left the kids, first with my brother, then with our mothers in Indiana.

  When the kids came to Nashville, we left ’em with babysitters. Now, babysitters are all right, if you keep the same ones. But we didn’t. We’d hire one babysitter for a month; then she’d quit or we’d fire her or something. It was hard on the kids and hard on me. I’d be in some motel room not knowing if the babies was eating right or going to school regular.

  Betty Sue, the oldest—I think it bothered her the most. Me and her are real close to begin with—I’ve known her since I was fourteen. She was always such a bright, sensitive little girl, and sometimes these are the ones that suffer the most. Betty can remember those real old days when we were poor—how I made her bloomers out of cut-down burlap bags when she went to school for the first time.

  When I started traveling, Betty was already in grade school. She didn’t want to move to Nashville and she still talks in a Washington accent rather than a Southern accent. Sometimes she talks about moving back there, although she and her husband are doing real good in Tennessee.