When we moved to Nashville, Doo let me know he wouldn’t stand for me changing my values. I know that sounds like a double standard, but that’s the way it is. I wasn’t going to change anyway. All I know is there’s no double standard in the eyes of God. It’s just as bad for any man as it is for any woman.
My problem is that I’m too friendly. I adopt people. Whoever is singing with me at the time becomes a good friend of mine. Like Conway Twitty, my duet partner. Doo knows me and Conway are friends. I love people and I love to give a hug or a kiss now and then. I’m affectionate. But I don’t get that excited over being around other men. It’s mostly in their minds. I just mind my own business and stay out of trouble that way.
Still, once in a while some guy would get the wrong idea just because I’d call him at three in the morning. I thought he was my friend so I’d call him. Heck, I call the Johnson girls at three in the morning, or I’ll wake Lorene Allen, my secretary, at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, just to ask a question. So I don’t mean nothing by it. But a few singers have gotten the idea that I was falling in love with ’em. And in Nashville, it isn’t long before somebody will carry the rumor to your husband.
One time my tour was in Knoxville, and Doo heard some gossip about me and a singer. He drove all the way to Knoxville in a rage, but when he got to the hotel, he said, “I already felt like the damn fool I was.” So he waited in my room until I got back from the show—alone, I might add. The next day he went home again. Really, he knows better. That’s happened a few times.
Now, jealousy works two ways. I know that Doo gets lonely if his woman’s not around. So if I’m on the road, I get all these visions of him having girlfriends back home. I’ll get all worked up and call home at night—and find out that Doo fell asleep at eight o’clock, exhausted from working on the ranch all day. He barely had enough strength to take off his boots, the twins will tell me. So 90 percent of the stuff you hear about Doo ain’t true, either.
Whatever you want to say about him, he’s an outdoor man and a family man. He’s not thinking up ways to get off to Las Vegas to play the card tables and drink champagne with showgirls. He couldn’t care less. He’d rather be out setting feeders for his quail, or driving a bulldozer, or playing with his babies than living it up.
In fact, I wished he liked the travel better than he does. Since we quit the Wilburns, Doo has had to travel more with me. He’s all right for a while, being cooped up in a motel room. And things run better when he’s around. The schedule is better, the shows are better, everyone does their job. But after a few days, Doo gets this panicked look on his face. He can’t let his feelings out the way I do, and he gets to feeling trapped on the road. He’ll take a long walk from the motel, try to find some country road, and just enjoy the sound of the birds and the wind and the farm machines. But usually we’re staying in one of those modern motels, surrounded by interstate highways and shopping centers, and there’s no place to walk. I know it’s hell on Doolittle.
And all those fans coming around. He’s polite to them; he’ll do favors for them, talk to them. But it’s like a car engine overheating. It’s painful to watch. The bad thing is Doo handles it by drinking. He don’t like the boys to drink on the bus, but he’ll have a cup of bourbon and just try to relax himself, or he’ll hit the bottle in the afternoon just out of boredom, I think. And then we’ll get into an argument, which maybe I’ll start by criticizing him. Or he’ll tell me I did something stupid in the show, which I don’t like because I’m the performer. I’ve learned to live with it, but it hurts me when Doo drinks too much.
More than once, I’ve been up on a stage giving a show, or getting some award in Nashville, knowing that Doo was out sleeping in the bus. He knows it just tears me up inside and he says he’s going to lick it by himself. I know if we could just slow down our pace a little, he’d be better, because Doo is a very capable, intelligent man.
Really, we’re so entirely different it’s a wonder we have stayed together. I think I need love and affection more than I need people telling me what to do. I just get all torn up by harsh words and violence. Like one time Doo got mad at a dog that was barking too much. So right in front of me, he just hit it once with a club and killed it. I just went to bed and stared at the ceiling for twenty-four hours, I felt so bad. I don’t believe in force, unless you’re really pushed. I think you can do things with kindness.
I don’t like to be told what to do. I like to be asked. I don’t think a man has the right to tell a woman what to do. He should say, “What do you think about this?” If somebody tells me what to do, I’ll do just the opposite, just because I’m meaner than a snake in some ways. You ask Owen Bradley. I’m like that at a recording session. Tell me one thing, I’ll do another. I never felt that one person owned another person. I think Doo feels the opposite. He feels he has the right to tell his wife what to do.
People who meet us get all nervous when they see us argue. Really, sometimes it looks bad. I’ll get some notion in my head and maybe I won’t even listen to him. Then he’ll get annoyed and start talking to me like I’m stupid. Sometimes that leads to one of my headaches, and I’ll just sleep for twelve or eighteen hours.
People who don’t know me too well get all nervous about that. They worry about me “escaping” into sleeping too much, or getting too nervous. But I usually bounce back the next morning. I’ll wake up and hear a redbird singing, or I’ll have a funny line in my head, and I’ll start joking around with Doolittle, and he’ll see that I’m happy again, and he’ll relax and take charge of the day’s doings. Then the same people who got so worried the day before will tiptoe past our motel room, and there we’ll be sitting around laughing like it never happened…until the next time.
People say, “You can’t live like that forever.” I say, look, we’ve stayed married this long; we must be doing something right. Sometimes people ask if we’ve ever gone for marriage counseling or guidance. Heck no. They don’t know as much as I do about marriage. They weren’t married as young as I was, I bet. I just believe you do what you can with yourself and hope for the best.
23
The Hyden Widows
We talked about the pretty lady from the Grand Ole Opry.
We talked about the money she was raising for the kids…
—“Trip to Hyden,” by Tom T. Hall
If there’s one way me and Doolittle are alike, it’s that both of us are soft touches for a sad story. And believe me, you hear a lot of them when you’re on the top in country music. Everybody expects you to do favors for them, and it’s hard to say no.
When we first got to the top in Nashville, me and Doo would agree to almost any benefit for a good cause. We were worn out until we hired David Skepner to be our manager, because he knew his job was to say no and protect us from ourselves.
You wouldn’t believe some of the requests we get. Like, we’ll be driving down the highway in the bus and some car will cut in front of us and make us stop. The people say they’ve got a sick relative dying in some cabin five miles off the road—and can we pay a visit? I’ve said yes a few times, and Doolittle hides his face when his tears start to show.
But Doo has more sense than me. He says he catches me staring out the windows at all those pickers that wander into Nashville trying to get discovered. He swears I’d hire every one of ’em if he didn’t put a stop to it.
We visit hospitals whenever we can. The best way to do it is to try and not think of all the problems that the people have. I was in the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington, and this young boy was in the cancer ward and he said, “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.” The boy said it like he was sure that I wouldn’t and he was all set to be disappointed. But I’ve got this memory for faces and it seemed like I knew him.
“Yes,” I said, “it was in London, England, two years ago at that big stadium. You said hello to me.”
And that boy got so excited he started crying. The doctor told him he didn’t have long to live, b
ut I told him, “Now, you just get better and then come and visit me at the ranch.” Just by the way he cheered up for a while, I felt I did something real good for somebody.
It’s the same way with charity. I would dig into my pocketbook and give away money all the time if they didn’t stop me. I’ve done it. Somebody tells me a story and I just say, “Here, take whatever I’ve got.” I know I can’t do that forever, so now they’ve worked it out where we give a certain amount to charities like United Way. Whenever some group talks to me, I tell ’em to see my manager. That sounds cold, but it’s the only way. And we give plenty. I know because we’ve helped build churches and given money to stop diseases, because I insist on it.
Doo keeps most of the letters away from me, but sometimes I get hold of one. We got a letter from a woman who said she had six kids and they were being evicted from their home and some had diseases. It was a real pitiful story. I was about to send ’em some money when Doo stopped me. Instead he called up the sheriff where that lady lives. The sheriff said that woman had six kids by six different men and that none of the kids had any diseases that he knew of. He also said they had a new car and a television on installments and that nobody was kicking them out. If it had been up to me, I’d have just sent the money.
I keep threatening to cut out all the extra appearances because I’m too tired. Pete Axthelm, who wrote such a nice story when I was on the cover of Newsweek magazine, remembers me saying, “No more benefits,” until somebody reminded me that we had a benefit scheduled the following Monday.
“But that’s for kids,” I said. “That’s different.”
Which is true. How’re you gonna turn down some poor kids?
Sometimes you can’t help but get involved. At least I can’t. My manager, David Skepner, told my writer this story, and it’s true:
“Loretta had just returned to Nashville from a grueling six-week tour, and as usual, on her first day back, everybody within a hundred-mile radius was there to tell her their problems. She was scheduled to do a benefit performance that night and she could hardly keep her eyes open. She knew a number of the local ‘squirrels’ were trying to see her and she started to leave the bus to talk to them. We quietly tried to explain that she needed thirty minutes of rest rather than listening to everyone’s problems. She looked at me with tired eyes that seemed to hold compassion for the whole world and said, ‘Listen, when I die, I want God to put me in charge of all the people that nobody loves.’
“That is what makes Loretta Lynn, Loretta Lynn.”
Well, that’s mighty nice people feel that way about me. I did say it and I meant it. And they can even put it on my tombstone when I die.
Sometimes it seems, though, the more I try to do good the more problems I have. I got into more trouble than you can imagine over that coal mine explosion at Hyden, Kentucky. There are still people down there that accuse me of lying, stealing, and cheating, when the truth is I put myself into the hospital because I just wore myself down with trying to make money to send their kids to college, to let ’em be somebody and stay away from the mines. But it didn’t work out too good.
Everybody’s told stories about me and Hyden, but I’ve never really told my side of it.
Hyden is a little town in Leslie County, Kentucky, about seventy-five miles from where I was born, but I never heard of it until December 30, 1970. Around noontime there was a terrific explosion at this mine on Hurricane Creek. That name caught my attention right away, because we live on Hurricane Creek down in Tennessee—but it’s a completely different creek.
This mine was what they call a drift mine—just like my daddy used to work in—a tunnel straight back into the mountain. But it was one of those dogholes, a cheap, nonunion mine, whereas Daddy always worked for big companies.
There were thirty-nine men working on the shift that day. One of them was just heading toward the outside when the explosion blew him clear across the road, but he was safe. The explosion blew dust and timber across the holler, like a tornado. And right away, the news went out over the radio. I heard about it even though I was in a different state. I said a prayer for those men because I’ve seen how mine disasters are, and I knew the picture was bad. Whenever there’s a disaster, the word gets out by telephone and radio, and by people yelling up their hollers. Within a few minutes, all the families of the miners were heading toward this narrow dirt road to the mine—women would just leave their cooking and their babies and start walking toward the mine to wait for the news. Nobody could go into the mine until the government inspectors got there, because there were all kinds of fumes. But even then, people knew it wasn’t going to be too good.
They waited all evening, while the holler was crowded with official cars and trucks. People built bonfires, and the Red Cross gave out baloney sandwiches and coffee. The families huddled together while the press and other outsiders stood and waited. Some women cried and others just stared. The governor of Kentucky said something cold about how mining is a rough business and you’ve got to expect things like this sometimes…That was before they even found any bodies.
It started to snow around nine o’clock, and it got real miserable down in that holler. Then the rescue crews found some bodies and bundled ’em in pitiful canvas bags and brought them out by stretchers.
Well, it snowed all night, and all thirty-eight men were dead. In two feet of snow, they brought the bodies to the Hyden School and let the next of kin identify each man. This was right after Christmas—decorations were still up—and they were holding funerals. I saw pictures on television—houses all lit up, each with the casket in the front room and people praying. I’ve been to mountain funerals, and I could just hear the wailing. I saw one woman throw herself on the casket. She was about twenty-three years old and had a couple of babies. I remember my mommy and all the years she worried about my daddy. And I just sat in front of that television and bawled like a baby.
We followed that story for days. The mine officials held a hearing and said the men were killed because somebody was probably using an illegal explosive that sets off sparks and probably touched off some dust. They still haven’t settled it legally—the issue is still in the courts—but that’s what was in the papers.
For me the thing that mattered was that thirty-eight men left 101 children behind. The insurance companies and the government people were trying to get those poor widows to sign all kinds of legal papers. And those women couldn’t afford lawyers, so they were signing for payments that would get the company and the government off the hook. Meanwhile they had to bury their husbands and keep on living.
This just tore me up because these women were no different than my mommy would have been—or me, when I first married Doo. Those women weren’t prepared for all this stuff because all that knowledge was in the heads of the men lawyers. So I decided I was gonna do something to help change things. The first thing was to visit Hyden. We went to the graveyards and I met the widows and I visited the mine. It was the saddest little mine, a little hole like a cave, no posts. All I kept saying was, “No wonder…”
I heard how Leslie County was one of the poorest counties in the whole United States, with a high birth rate and a high death rate. And the mines were the only way to make a living. Maybe the men did know what was going on in that mine, but if they or their wives had complained, they would have been out of a job and on welfare.
I decided I would help at a benefit show for the widows. But I didn’t want the money to go just to lawyers or to get spent right away. I wanted the money to help people to break that way of living that keeps them poor and uneducated, that forces men to work in doghole mines and women to have too many babies and not know how to deal with lawyers and slippery little government officials.
Well, we organized this benefit for March 1, 1971, and we held it in Freedom Hall in Louisville, which can hold over fifteen thousand people. We got more than forty performers from Nashville. Over forty radio stations carried it.
I went around for
a month beforehand, publicizing the benefit. I’d talk about it during my show; then I’d fly to Hollywood or New York and go on a talk show just to plug my benefit. I’d try to get the hosts of these shows to talk seriously about the sad life of a miner. It ain’t easy being serious on these talk shows, if the hosts just want to make fun of your language or hear hillbilly stories. But I think I got my message across anyway.
People say I did it for publicity or something. Well, let me tell you, friends, I spent over $10,000 out of my own pocket just flying around between dates. And another thing, this was at the time when I was starting to break up with the Wilburns, and my health was starting to go on me.
Finally the night came. The Greyhound bus brought the families up from Hyden. Colonel Sanders, the real Colonel Sanders—he’s from Kentucky himself—gave out free dinners.
The show wasn’t organized as well as it should have been, because of Doyle Wilburn not being in good shape. The widows were seated off to the side somewhere. During the early part of the show, they actually threatened to walk out if they weren’t treated better. It was all a misunderstanding, but David Skepner, who was working for Music Corporation of America at the time, had to do some fast work to make everyone happy. There was a lot of tension, but Doolittle got the show done with a lot of good country music and speeches and appeals for donations.
We heard that money came in from as far away as Canada, Sweden, and the Bahamas. One joker in Macon, Georgia, fancied himself a big steel executive and pledged one million dollars. Before we could check it out, somebody announced it over the microphone, and everybody went crazy. They were all figuring out the good things they could buy with a million dollars. But later it turned out the guy was just being funny at our expense, and we tried to explain to the widows that it was just a bad joke.
Coal Miner's Daughter Page 17