Coal Miner's Daughter

by Coal Miner's Daughter (Expanded

  One time we were on the beach and there was one American guy in the waves and another on the beach. I said, “You sure got your britches wet.” He said to his friend: “If this wasn’t Mexico, I’d swear that was Loretta Lynn.”

  But the people don’t care who I am. And my fans don’t know where I am. It’s the one place I can go to relax. So I ain’t gonna tell nobody where it is.

  We bring the babies down with us. They think they’re getting a good deal by getting out of school. But Gloria, our housekeeper, comes down with ’em. She finds out all their work from their teacher and she makes ’em work every morning. They fight with her like mad. They come to me and I tell them to get back to Gloria before I whip ’em. So I make sure they get their work done.

  I guess one of the things I like best about Mexico is the people. The Spanish and the Indians, they show their affections. I think it’s bad when you can’t. When a man says to his boy, “You shouldn’t hug; you should be a man,” I think it’s a shame. Ever since Daddy died, I made it a point to show my feelings because I don’t think I ever let Daddy know how much I loved him. Daddy was never able to see me as a performer, and he didn’t have nothing. I wish I could have given him more. I was always able to show my affections but not as much until Daddy died. I guess that’s why people follow me from show to show. Love is like a magnet.

  We have a boat down there. Doo likes to go out and go real fast, but like I said before, I’m scared of the water and always have been. I believe I must have drowned in one of my earlier lives, and since I almost drowned in Tennessee, I’ve been real scared of water. Doo tells me I’m no fun because I won’t let him go fast, but we do have a good time. We fish and eat all day long.

  That’s another reason Mexico is good for me. After my 1973 tour, I was down to about ninety pounds. It was disgraceful. I was wearing size-three dresses. None of my regular clothes fit. I was ashamed to let people see my arms and legs, I was so skinny. We got down to Mexico right after Christmas, and I could see Doo was worried about me. I was nervous, tense, underweight, and worried.

  Doo, who is supposed to be this tough guy, was watching me to make sure I’d be all right. Well, the first morning we were there, I ate a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, biscuits, and potatoes and whatever else there was. Then we went out to the beach. Around ten o’clock, I started dipping into the lunch basket, eating sandwiches and cookies and anything that was packed. By lunchtime I’d eaten somebody else’s food. Then I ate a big supper, and in the evening I’d eat another snack. I’d just eat like a pig all day.

  Well, I gained about one pound a day for almost a month. Doo said I was like a flower opening up. He said he could see the color coming back day by day. And it was true. I stayed a month more and canceled an appearance. When we had to go back to work again, I weighed 115 pounds. I was back up to a size five or seven again, and I didn’t look like a ghost. The only time I felt sick was when I thought about going back. I’m telling you, I was born to be a housewife, not a singer.

  During the work year, Doo is always pestering me to eat. Whenever I get nervous about some little problem, I just think about Mexico. I can’t wait to get back there. I just let my hair hang long and stringy and don’t care how I look. And that’s the way I like it. I’m telling you, someday they’re gonna be looking for me backstage and I ain’t gonna be there. But I’m gonna pin up a note and it’s gonna say, “Buenas Noches.”

  26

  Entertainer of the Year

  Why me, Lord, what have I ever done

  To deserve even one of the pleasures I’ve known?…

  —“Why Me?,” by Kris Kristofferson

  Going out on my own was the best thing I ever could have done. I hate to put it in terms of money, but how else do you measure your value? When I left the Wilburns, I was getting around $2,500 to $3,000 per show. Now I get around $10,000 a show. I don’t think I’ve improved that much as a performer, so it must be the people who are managing my business.

  Doolittle has taken more interest in the management; plus, we’ve hired real professionals to do the work. Me and Conway Twitty have our own booking agency called United Talent. Jimmy Jay books us the best schedules in country music.

  I’ve also got an office on Music Row, where Lorene Allen is the manager. She keeps me posted on all the news and writes some of my songs.

  And I’ve gotten a lot of nice publicity since we started working with a smart fellow named David Brokaw out in California. I always look forward to my trips to California to talk to him.

  We’ve also got some interest in the Loretta Lynn clothing stores. We used to have a rodeo for ten years, but we got too busy and had to sell it. I know it broke Doo’s heart—but now he’s got the dude ranch on our property, with room for around 180 trailers. So that’s keeping him busy.

  I don’t know if we really should have all these side businesses. Instead of just doing my own show, I’m worrying about whether it’s raining on our dude ranch, or whether Kenny Starr, the young boy who sings in our show, will have a hit record. Plus, all my companies have given us a payroll of over $350,000 a year.

  There’ve been times in the past when I took on extra dates just to pump money into one of our businesses. I used to play over 200 dates a year. Now I’ve cut it back to 125, mainly because my money is being handled better.

  Things have been more organized since we hired David Skepner away from the Music Corporation of America. David is a college graduate from Beverly Hills, California, who’s our business advisor. His job is to advise me and Doolittle what our choices are—and we make the decisions. Sometimes people get upset when he protects me from too much attention. I’ll tease him by saying, “I know what people are saying—‘There comes Loretta Lynn and her SOB.’”

  David has cured me of carrying too much cash around with me. One time in New York City, I had $30,000 in cash in my pocketbook. I thought David would explode. He asked a policeman to escort us to the nearest bank, where we could convert the money into cashier’s checks. David once told a reporter, “Loretta has no idea what she’s worth. All she knows is that she has a good time every day and she gets well paid for it.”

  Well, I’m getting a little smarter than that. David has given me a lot more confidence about appearing on television. He’s been able to book me on all the major shows and he always tells me, “Loretta, just act natural. Say whatever you think is right, and the people will accept it.”

  And that’s what I’ve been doing, folks. I’ll never forget the time I fell asleep on The David Frost Show while the queen of women’s liberation was talking. It happened like this: I was back in the dressing room and this gal started cussing and arguing something terrible with a guy from a union. I didn’t know this woman from Adam. She was running on about women’s rights. I said something like, “Isn’t it awful what you have to put up with in your own dressing room?” and she smarted off at me, and we were really going at it. Then I get on the show and they march her out—and I said, “Oh my God, it’s her.” It was that Betty Friedan. Anyhow, she starts talking about women’s liberation. If I’m not interested in what somebody is saying, I let my mind wander. I must have closed my eyes for a few seconds because all of a sudden I hear David Frost say to me, “What do you think of that, Loretta?”

  I guess I jumped a little bit and I said, “What?” like I was real startled. That made everyone in the audience laugh, but I didn’t mean to be smart about it. I just wasn’t listening, that’s all.

  Dinah Shore had me on her show. She’s from Tennessee, and we always talk about biscuits and stuff. She’s got the kind of show where if I mess up, we just laugh and go ahead with it. To me, that’s what country is, too. And that’s my idea of television.

  I don’t think television has country down right yet. They’ve had me on variety shows, but there’s always some guy from Los Angeles or New York running around behind those sunglasses telling us just where to stand. What you see on television is a bunch of poor old country boys and
girls hunching up their shoulders and looking like they wished they were never born. Now, that’s not country. I say, let us out there with our own bands, not those television bands with their saxophones and clarinets. If you just put me in front of that camera, I’d say, “Let ’er rip, Flip!” And we’d give ’em a good show. But television’s not ready for us yet to be ourselves.

  I’m still unhappy because we didn’t get a national television show. They had me and George Lindsey—Goober—on the Orange Blossom Special USA on Thursday, November 15, 1973, right after The Waltons. They were going to see if I could be the first female country singer to have her own national show.

  I’ve always said that if you want to be a success, you have to be yourself. Sure, you need writers, but you’ve got to take what they give you and turn it into you. I do my own shows, where I ain’t afraid of saying what I think. But when I get on television, they’re always passing those cards at you with those big words. Yes, I admit I have trouble reading those big words, but when I did that show, I was just myself. We just didn’t get enough rating points to get the show. But you can’t argue with them. I figure it will come up again sometime.

  After I did the benefit for Hyden, I got a letter from then president Nixon. I thought that was nice of him. I thought about writing back to him to ask why they put Kelly in jail. I meant Lieutenant William Calley, the guy they convicted in the massacres of My Lai. I thought his name was Kelly. I don’t know too much about it but it seemed strange they should pin everything on one little lieutenant. Maybe he did wrong, but there were a lot of other people who should have known better, too. Either everybody who was guilty should be put in jail or nobody should be put in jail.

  Anyway, before I got a chance to write, I got invited to Washington myself, for a dinner. I mean, not just me, but around a thousand people who worked for the United Way in the United States and Canada. They were honoring Mrs. Nixon for her work in the charity. I made a commercial that raised enough money to put up a new building, so I got invited. Well, I figured as long as I was going to be singing there, I might as well speak my piece. When I got on the stage, I said, “Pat, I’ve been wanting to write a letter to tell Richard to let Kelly go. We brought Kelly home from Vietnam and put him in jail. Why don’t we stop picking on just that one little man or else let him go?”

  I could tell that shook some people up. But I didn’t have time to think about it because I had to sing my song. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw it the next day on the front page of the Washington Post. They acted like I did something bad calling her husband Richard.

  The next day we flew to Chicago for a show, and this television announcer met me at the airport. He asked me why I addressed the president of the United States as “Richard.” I said, “They called Jesus ‘Jesus,’ didn’t they?” That guy took one look at me and started running. I never learned his name or I might have called him by his first name, too.

  It seems funny that anyone would mind what I was saying. That’s why I appreciate my fans; they accept me for being myself. The only bad publicity I’ve ever gotten was in my home state when some people said I should pay for paving the road up to Butcher Holler. But mostly I get good stories because I tell the truth. Whenever I get involved in anything, I get in touch with a columnist in Nashville named Red O’Donnell. I call him up and tell him exactly what it’s all about. I trust him to get the true facts out, whatever they are.

  Since I struck out on my own, lots of different things have happened to me. Why, I was even in Penthouse magazine with all those naked women. I didn’t know what kind of magazine it was. This reporter came in and said he was gonna do a story on me. Well, that was just fine with me.

  Then one day we were sitting in the airport and I wandered over to see if they had the magazine. I took one look at the cover, and boy, was I shocked! I didn’t know it was that kind of magazine. I wanted to see it but I was too bashful to buy it from the lady. So I got my bus driver, Jim Webb, to buy it. I was afraid maybe they caught me in some picture without my clothes on, except I’m so skinny they’d be out of luck. As far as I know, there’s only one set of nude pictures of me in the world. They were taken by Doolittle when I was around sixteen. He had converted one of our rooms into a darkroom, and he got me to pose for him. We’ve talked about burning ’em, but we decided to keep ’em under lock and key. We take ’em out once in a while, just for a laugh. But Penthouse didn’t get ahold of them, and their story was pretty nice.

  By now, my career was really rolling along. I had little singing parts in four movies—Forty Acre Feud, Music City U.S.A., Nashville Rebel, and The Nashville Sound—and I was the first woman country artist to receive a gold album for one million sales—for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” which I wrote with my sister.

  But I don’t always write all my songs. Sometimes we get songs from fellows like Shel Silverstein. Now, he isn’t what I’d call country. He’s bald and he’s got a beard and from what I hear he spends a lot of time at Playboy king Hugh Hefner’s houses in Chicago and Los Angeles. Plus, he’s got himself a houseboat out in Sausalito, California. But he knows how to write country songs. Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” is one of Shel’s songs, and he wrote “One’s on the Way.” I recorded that one, and it turned out to be a smash. Shel also wrote “Hey, Loretta,” which I didn’t like because I don’t care for songs about myself. He heard that I wasn’t going to do it and flew in from Alaska. We finally put it on an album, but the disc jockeys demanded that we also make it a single. I got to like it—especially when it got to be number one.

  But people got to know me best after I wrote my life story on that song “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” That really made me familiar to people—it gave me a title they could remember. And it told everybody that I could write about something else besides marriage problems.

  I’m proud that other writers like that song. I’d always wanted to write a song about growing up, but I never believed anybody would care about it. One day I was sitting around the television studio at WSIX, waiting to rehearse a show. I figured this was a good time to work on a song. I went off to the dressing room and just wrote the first words that came into my head.

  It started, “Well, I was borned a coal miner’s daughter…” which was nothing but the truth. And I went on from there. I made up the melody at the same time, line by line, like I always do. It started out as a bluegrass thing, ’cause that’s the way I was raised, with the guitar and the banjo just following along. Really, the way you hear it on the record is the way I imagined it.

  I had a little trouble with the rhymes. I had to match up words like “holler” and “daughter” and “water.” But after it was all done, the rhymes weren’t so important.

  In a couple of hours, I had nine of the best verses I ever wrote. The next time I had a recording session, I did that song. But you know what? We kept it in the can for a year. I didn’t believe anybody would buy a song just about me.

  When they finally released it and had to cut three verses, like I said before, it just about broke my heart. One verse was about Mommy papering the walls with magazines, right above my head, with pictures of movie stars and such. Another was how the creek would rise every time it rained, and Daddy would have to cut logs across, so we could get downhill. The third was about hog-killing day in December, so we’d have fresh meat for Christmas. I can remember Mommy yelling, “backbones and ribs,” while Daddy was a-scraping the hair off the hog.

  Well, they released that record around the start of 1971, and three weeks later somebody called up to say it was a smash. I said, “Ahhhh, come on,” because I never believed it. But they made an album called Coal Miner’s Daughter and it made me so popular it led to the biggest award of my life.

  Everyone knows about the Oscars for the movies and the Emmys for television. Well, country music has its own awards. They give ’em out every October in Nashville, on national television, on the same week as the Grand Ole Opry’s bir
thday. That’s the week they have the big Disc Jockey Convention, when all those boys from around the country flock to Nashville to listen to all the musicians. It’s all sponsored by the Country Music Association, which is a big collection of publishers, promoters, record companies, disc jockeys, writers—everybody in country music, really. Everybody has one vote and they go for the top singers, the top songs, the best duet of the year. But the biggest award of all is Entertainer of the Year.

  The Entertainer of the Year Award goes to the performer who puts on the best shows on tour and on television, plus putting out good records. It’s the best, really. For the first five years that award went to the men—Eddy Arnold, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Charley Pride—which was all right with me.

  The way I see it, the men travel with bands and they put on a complete show. They have good women singers with ’em, plus extra male singers, plus maybe a comic or a musical act. But they are the stars. They get right out there and tell stories and run the whole show. But the women, the way it always was, just sing their songs and act more ladylike.

  Now that’s changing. You’ve got a lot of us with our own bands and leading our own shows. I give around two hours of a show every time I put my name on the program. I’ll dance and tell jokes and let my boys play their instruments. And we give an extra-good show whenever I have Ernest Tubb, Cal Smith, or Conway Twitty on with me. So I feel like I’m an entertainer, just like the men.

  Well, in 1972, I got nominated for Entertainer of the Year. I didn’t care if I won it. I was just proud to be the first woman ever nominated. We always schedule ourselves into Nashville for that DJ convention, but this year it was especially important, because I wanted to be there for the awards. When we looked at our calendar, though, Doo realized he’d arranged to take a bunch of his friends out to Colorado to go hunting. Doo said he would cancel but I said, “Go ahead and go hunting,” because I knew he’d rather be out in the woods than sitting indoors. I felt bad that he wasn’t going to be there, but I understand what he needs to do.