“I’ve always been a good little Southern cook, but this has given me the opportunity to really do a lot of cooking. These kids know me for my mashed potatoes as much as they do for my music, which makes me happy. The other boring, nerd thing that I do is I crochet. You know, I’m really boring, but very happy.”
There is just one little problem: “Being with Garth and him being retired from the road, people sometimes think I am too. And I’m quick to say, ‘He’s retired. I’m not.’ I’m not finished, and I don’t know when that time will come for me.”
9
Loretta and Doo
Iknow what love is,” says Loretta Lynn without hesitation, “because I love Doo.”
She speaks of her late husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, in the present tense, although Doo died more than a decade ago. Doo was more than her husband. He practically raised Loretta. And he is the reason she became a singing star. In the early years of her career, he pushed her onto the stage, into radio stations, and to the Grand Ole Opry.
“When you can’t forget somebody, you must love them, right?” adds Loretta. “When I’m down at the ranch, it’s really weird, because a lot of times I’ll raise up and holler, ‘What?’ because I’ll hear him speak my name.
“I think that’s why I keep trying to run from down there. But it’s no use running. I go and stay there when I’m off the road. But when I’m on the road, I try to stay away from there as much as possible, because it is hard on me.”
Loretta has a house in Nashville where she stays when touring, but her memory-filled antebellum mansion still stands on the grounds of Loretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. The iconic house and her turbulent marriage are familiar to millions, thanks to her best-selling autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter and the Oscar-winning film it inspired.
“Doo was really a sweet, tender person when he wasn’t out there trying to show off in the public. He tried to hold up his image a lot, and all he’d do was get in trouble. Every time he’d get drunk and carry on, we’d all hear about it. So he couldn’t win.”
Just as Loretta had her image as a feisty country superstar, Doo had his as a macho roughneck. The interplay between the two fascinated her millions of fans.
Born Loretta Webb on April 14, 1935, in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, she was famously just thirteen years old when she met and married the love of her life. He was a twenty-one-year-old army veteran with a wild reputation. His family had nicknamed him “Doolittle” because he was such a small baby. In fact, Loretta thought that was his real name until she saw “Oliver” on their marriage license.
“We’d only went together a month when I married him,” Loretta explains. “One month! We started going together the tenth day of December, and on the tenth day of January [1948], we got married.
“He asked, ‘Will you marry me?’ the day before we got married. Mommy and Daddy ’bout died. Mommy cried all night long. Daddy was so tore up. But he’d asked them [for their permission] the night before.
“When I was two months pregnant, he’d already left me. He’d found him a new girlfriend, he said. I found out the kind of girlfriend he was with wasn’t really the kind of girl he wanted to be married to. So he was really not what he seemed to be.”
Determined to get her husband back, the teenager wrote to her rival and told the hussy in no uncertain terms to “lay off.” A contrite Doo was by then offering to buy baby clothes. She was fourteen and seven months pregnant when Doo moved Loretta 2,000 miles across the country to the state of Washington. When his workmates there learned he had smuggled moonshine whiskey back home in Kentucky, they gave him his second nickname, “Mooney.”
By age eighteen, Loretta Lynn had four children. Isolated from her family, tied down by motherhood, burdened by ceaseless domestic work, and desperately lonely, she found solace in her singing. Doo listened to her and declared that she was as good as anyone he heard on the radio.
“He’s the one that started me singin’,” Loretta reports. “He come in one day from work and said, ‘Loretta, I’ve heard you singin’ rockin’ the babies to sleep, and as I listen to the radio, there’s no girls on the radio that cain’t sing any better than you. I think I’m gonna try to do something with your voice.’ And he did.”
He bought her a $17 guitar, and she taught herself to play it. In 1959, he began taking the shy Loretta into local honky-tonks and forcing her to sing in front of audiences. He pushed her to enter a Tacoma talent contest, which she won. Future superstar Buck Owens (1929–2006) began to feature Loretta on his Tacoma country TV show. A Canadian businessman saw her on it and financed a trip to Los Angeles to record her self-penned tune “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.”
“I wrote my first song when I was about ten years old. I started writing songs not even really knowing how to do it when I was just a kid. But when I did really start getting down to writing was when Doo said I was going to sing. Doo bought me a guitar and expected me to write songs. And that was it. He bought me a Country Song Roundup [magazine]. I learned how to write in there,” by studying the hit song lyrics that the periodical published in each issue.
Doo found a list of country-music radio stations. He took a photo of Loretta in a cowgirl outfit and mailed it with copies of “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” to each station on the list. Then he piled his bride into his old Mercury sedan and took her from station to station for three solid months. At each stop, she’d change into the cowgirl outfit, go into the station, and charm the local disc jockey into playing her record. At KCKY in Coolidge, Arizona, the DJ was future star Waylon Jennings (1937–2002).
“The first time I ever saw Loretta Lynn, was in Arizona,” Waylon later recalled. “I was a disc jockey out there, and this beautiful little girl came in with the thickest accent I had ever heard in my life. But she was just gorgeous you know, and she had this record with her. She brought this record in and asked me if I would play it. It was on the Zero label, that’s the reason I remember it. And so we sat there that afternoon, and she talked to me. I gave her a tape of a couple of songs that I had written. She’s still got ’em. We’ve been friends ever since.”
Amazingly, Doo’s homespun approach to the music business worked. Despite being on the dinky Zero label, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” appeared on the national country popularity charts in the summer of 1960. It also brought the couple to Nashville and to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. On October 15, 1960, Loretta made her Opry debut, singing her against-all-odds hit.
“When I first stepped on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, they had to push me out on the stage because I was so bashful and backward. I remember patting my foot to my song. I don’t remember singing, but I do remember patting my foot.
“Doo was outside [the Ryman Auditorium] trying to get it on the radio,” Loretta remembers. “He was out in the alley, and he was trying to get it on his car radio. I came out the back and hollered, ‘Honey, I’ve just sung on the Grand Ole Opry!’ And he was still just trying to get it. There was so much static he couldn’t figure out what was going on. He never even heard me! But he come running, and we were hugging.”
Early in her Nashville career, Loretta was aided by a number of Opry stars. The show’s handsome and popular Wilburn Brothers were the first and foremost in this regard. Doo and Loretta approached them for career advice. Doyle Wilburn (1930–1982) and Teddy Wilburn (1931–2003) were then at the peak of their success. Since joining the Opry in 1953, the duo had racked up eight top-ten country hits, including “Sparkling Brown Eyes” (1954) and “Somebody’s Back in Town” (1959). Astute businessmen, the brothers also owned a song-publishing company and a management firm. Loretta signed with both, and the brothers instantly went to work.
Teddy had Loretta record a tune from their company called “The Biggest Fool of All,” and Doyle played the result for Decca Records executive Owen Bradley. Owen said Loretta sounded too much like his label’s star, Kitty Wells, but that he wanted the song for another Decca headliner, Brenda Lee. T
he Wilburns insisted that if Owen took the song, he had to offer Loretta a recording contract. So Brenda got the retitled smash “Fool #1,” and Loretta got a major-label deal.
“Loretta was real timid and real bashful,” Owen Bradley recalled. “I told her, ‘You sound like a female Hank Williams.’”
Produced by Owen, “Success” became her first Decca hit in 1962. On the strength of that, the Wilburns successfully lobbied the Opry to add her to its cast. Loretta Lynn became an official Grand Ole Opry member on September 24, 1962. “Before I’m Over You” (1963) and “Wine, Women and Song” (1964) were Loretta’s next big hits. The Wilburns featured her on their nationally syndicated TV series. Even so, she was very much a newcomer when her next Opry booster stepped into the picture.
By the 1960s, Ernest Tubb (1914–1984) was unquestionably a country superstar. Ernest was one of the great innovators. He was a founder of the post–World War II honky-tonk style, popularized the electric guitar in country music, took the Opry to Carnegie Hall for the first time, campaigned against the use of the term “hillbilly,” created the still-thriving late-night radio show The Midnite Jamboree, and built the Ernest Tubb Record Shop into an international retail phenomenon. In the early 1960s, he decided he wanted a female duet partner. He could have had his pick of any of country’s women. But he chose the relatively unknown Loretta Lynn.
They debuted as a team with 1964’s “Mr. and Mrs. Used to Be.” It was the first of their four big duet hits. They also recorded three albums together in 1964–1966.
“I learned a great deal from Ernest Tubb. He said to me, ‘Now hon, I’m gonna tell you something in this business. Tomorrow you may not have a hit record.’ And, of course, for twenty-five years, I had records in the charts, so I couldn’t complain. And for twenty-five years I kept looking for ’em to flop out of the charts, you know. But that’s something that every artist should know. That they’re not gonna be up there forever, and tomorrow may be their last big hit record.
“Ernest Tubb helped more people in this business than anybody else. Ernest was probably never given the credit for helping as many people as he has. He put me on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop’s Midnite Jamboree radio show and helped me get on the Grand Ole Opry for the first time that I was on.
“Decca Records asked Ernest Tubb, ‘If you could record with anybody you wanted to, who would you like to record with?’ I was just the new girl on the block at the time, but he said, ‘If I could record with anybody, I would love to record with the little new girl called Loretta Lynn.’ So they called me and asked me if I would do it, and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t believe this.’ He’s the only one that ever did come on the radio—when Daddy had the old Philco radio—that just about every song he sang, I would cry. I don’t know why to this day. But I can still listen to Ernest Tubb and cry. He would be singing ‘It’s Been So Long Darling,’ and I would cry. Then when he sang ‘Rainbow at Midnight,’ I would cry. I was just a little girl, and I never dreamed I’d ever, ever sing with Ernest Tubb. And the last time that I stood up and sang with Ernest Tubb was like the first time. Never got used to ever singing with Ernest Tubb, because he was such a great hero to me. I can’t even explain it. He was a monument to me. They just don’t make ’em like Ernest Tubb anymore.”
The third Opry star who mentored Loretta was the great Patsy Cline. Patsy taught the youngster how to dress, apply makeup, and style her hair. She taught her about backstage jealousy and about onstage finesse. Loretta idolized and adored Patsy.
“I wanted to be just like Patsy. But how could you be like Patsy? She was twenty-five years ahead of her time, and everybody thought I was twenty-five years behind my time. Patsy, bless her heart, she done everything she could to help me.
“Patsy was a person that said her words perfect. If you’ve ever listened to her singing, you’ll notice that ever’ word that she says in her songs are perfect. Right? Well you might ought to think how it was for me and Patsy to sit down and carry on a conversation. She would be laughing at everything I would say. And I’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ I thought, you know, maybe I’d told a joke or something. She’d say, ‘The way you just said so-and-so,’ and she’d laugh.
“Patsy taught me how to do a lot of my dressing. She bought a lot of my clothes for me. She would give me clothes to wear. I didn’t have much. She’d tell me how to go onstage and how to come offstage.”
Patsy was also responsible for Loretta learning to stand up for herself. The superstar went toe-to-toe with her ne’er-do-well husband Charlie Dick. As Loretta grew to womanhood, she became more feisty with Oliver Doolittle Lynn. His philandering led to Loretta writing more and more self-assertive songs and becoming increasingly outspoken about women’s issues. “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’” (1966) wasn’t fictional. It was the truth.
“He liked to drink, but not backstage. He liked to drink, but he didn’t want nobody to watch him. You can’t blame him. It seemed to me like I knew how to [pick a fight] when it came to Doo. Because if I was tired or wanted to be left alone, one or two little things would just set him off. Well, I wouldn’t have to worry about him for the rest of the evening, because he’d go get drunk and stay that way for a day or two.
“You know, before I started singing, and I lived out in the state of Washington, I swore if I ever got away and got back to Kentucky where I could leave and be on my own again, I’d do it. But I didn’t. I thought to myself, ‘Don’t get too big for your britches. Don’t act like you’re better than he is.’ You have to love somebody really well and respect them. If you don’t respect them, there’s no use loving them.
“And I did respect Doo. He kept me grounded. And I could always look to him if I had a record out or if I done a good job onstage or whatever. I could always depend on him telling me the truth.
“When I was writing the song ‘Fist City,’ he said, ‘You’re gonna have to speak them words real plain when you sing, “gonna tell you gals to lay offa my man if you don’t wanna go to Fist City.” He said, ‘It sounds like you’re saying, “gonna tell you GUYS.”’ I feel like he was probably what made me do things as well as I did. He was the reason I tried to do better. It made me more nervous if he was backstage at a show. Because I felt like I had to be perfect around him.
“So he kept me pretty straight on a lot of things. I miss that right now. It’s hard to find somebody to do that, because everybody around you is going to say, ‘Yeah, you did great,’ because they don’t want you to be mad at them.
“That’s what I really miss about him, is the way we played off each other. I think he was good for me. I think we were both good for each other.”
Not that every day was peaches and cream. “Fist City” (1968) and “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (1966) came from a very real place. Yes, there were “other women.”
“Behind my back, he was out with the guys pulling that stuff. You can’t win, can you?
“I was out in Vegas, and at the Aladdin Theater the tables are right up next to the stage. This ole gal kept hollering that she was going out with Doolittle. She kept hollering, ‘I went out with your old man. I was out with him on Monday when I went to the Dude Ranch.’ And blah-blah-blah. She kept carrying on like that. I said, ‘Well, I’ll just come out and see if you’re woman enough to take my man!’ I just laid the microphone down. I started walking on the tables! It cost me a lot of money in spilled drinks getting to her. They drug her out before I got to her table. So Doo and I both probably had our faults when it came to stuff like that [fighting].”
The Wilburn Brothers tried to polish her countrified image. Producer Owen Bradley disagreed, telling them to let her be her natural self. He was the wise one, because Loretta’s Appalachian twang, natural sense of humor, and blunt-spoken honesty charmed everyone.
Loretta recalls one incident early in her career with typical candor—“The first time that I got heels was when Teddy Wilburn locked my boots up in the trunk of the car. We were on tour. He locked my boots up in the trunk of the
car and went out and bought me a pair of heels about that high. So that was all I had to wear on the stage. And I went on the stage in Salt Lake City, I’ll never forget it if I live to be 150 years old—which I will. I went onstage and had my guitar on my back. There was a little gate that you had to walk through to get up on the stage, and I couldn’t even get through that gate with them high heels on and my guitar. The disc jockey had to help me get up onstage. I walked on the stage, and I know the people thought I was drunk. For the first two or three songs I was standing there, and it was killing me. I thought, ‘I’ve got to let ’em know I’m not drunk,’ ’cause I don’t drink. So I pulled off my shoes, and I said, ‘Friends, I don’t wear high heels. This is the first pair I’ve ever had. Teddy Wilburn has my boots out in the trunk of his car and won’t give ’em to me. I can’t wear these shoes. If you don’t mind I’ll just finish my show barefooted.’ And that’s the way I finished my show.”
She buck-danced barefooted in her concerts for many years to come.
By 1964, Loretta had tallied six straight hits and was working continually. When she found out she was pregnant again, she burst into tears. She feared her burgeoning career was coming to an end. Doo, on the other hand, seemed pleased with his accomplishment.
Her older children, Betty Sue, Jack Benny, Ernest Ray, and Cissie, were joined by twins Patsy and Peggy in 1964. From the start, Doo doted on them. Loretta went back to work, and he became “Mr. Mom.” He also got a vasectomy. “When they start coming in pairs, it’s time to quit,” quipped Loretta.
Loretta Lynn was named the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 1967. By the end of the decade, she had sixteen top-ten hits. It was only the beginning. Her star ascended even higher in the 1970s. On the strength of such hits as “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1970) and “One’s on the Way” (1972), she was again named CMA’s Female Vocalist in 1972 and 1973. In 1972, she became the first woman to win the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award. “After the Fire Is Gone” (1971), “Lead Me On” (1971), “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” (1973), and other hits led to CMA Duo of the Year awards for Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975.
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain Page 10