Visionary songwriter and role model for generations of country and pop artists

Five years ago, Loretta Lynn suffered a stroke. She was 85 years old and must have had a moment of reflection after that setback and a glimpse of her immense career. Lynn had toured continuously for nearly sixty years, moving from one show to the next. She’d single-handedly put together a bulging record cabinet and written books full of songs, always about that life that was never easy, yet so damn beautiful. Lynn was a persistent person, but now she might have to stop performing all the time.

And what did she do after that drastic decision? Write new songs and release even more albums. Her sixtieth album was released last year Still Woman Enough, which turned out to be her last when the legendary country singer passed away last Monday. The record starts with the title song, a reference to her famous album You Ain’t Woman Enough from 1966 and with a text in which she once again explains why she is such a fighter: ‘I’m still woman enough, still got what it takes inside. I know how to love, lose, and survive. Ain’t much I ain’t seen, I ain’t tried. Been knocked down, but never out of the fight.’

Surrounded with love

Lynn had set her incomprehensible life to music more than once. Her album was released in 1971 Coal Miner’s Daughter, one of the great classics of American country. An album so gripping that it was made into a film in 1980, won an Oscar and was designated a protected cultural heritage site by the US Library of Congress.

Lynn was born in 1932 in the hamlet of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky as Loretta Webb, daughter of a poverty-stricken family of eight children. Her father worked as a miner and could barely feed his family. But according to Lynn, despite the harsh circumstances, she was surrounded with love, as she sang in Coal Miner’s Daughter, that would become her anthem: ‘We were poor but we had love. That’s the one thing that daddy made sure of.’

At the age of 15, Lynn married Oliver Lynn, six years her senior, nicknamed Doolittle, whom she had met a month earlier. By the time she was 20, she had already given birth to four children – with two more to follow. The early years of her marriage were grueling as ‘Doo’ drank and cheated liberally while his wife looked after her children at home. And her husband acted like her second father, Lynn later wrote in her memoir: “I went from Daddy to Doo: there was always a man who told me what to do.”

But Lynn also bit herself. “He never hit me without getting two blows in return,” was one of her oft-quoted statements. She took refuge in music: Lynn bought a cheap guitar and started writing songs around her 20s. And there she also competed against dominant men, including her own, to whom she remained loyal in spite of everything until his death in 1996.

In the 1950s, Lynn started performing in local bars. She formed a band called The Trailblazers and participated in talent shows. Lynn was discovered, signed with her first record company Zero Records and started her music career. In 1962 she already had a big hit with the song success and an endless stream of songs and albums followed, including her breakthrough record Fist Cityfrom 1968.

loose morals

Lynn stood out with combative, autobiographical songs about very normal American women living in very abnormal circumstances. She sang about unequal family relationships, about bourgeois morality and the difficulties women experienced after divorce.

Many of her songs were seen as controversial by conservative America. Her song became famous The Pill from 1975, about a woman who becomes pregnant year after year and can finally try to take control of her life thanks to birth control. Many radio stations refused to play the song because it would promote ‘a loose moral’, but Lynn still had a hit with it.

Lynn was able to bring hot topics to the attention of millions of Americans, also because her songs were always accessible, sounded remarkably cheerful and, moreover, were carried by a penetrating but flawless and cheerful voice. Lynn grew into one of America’s biggest country stars in the 1970s. She was showered with all imaginable prizes and became even bigger through her collaboration with the singer Conway Twitty, with whom she sang unforgettable duets on, for example, the hit record Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man from 1973.

But on her passing Monday at the age of 90, Lynn is remembered above all as a visionary songwriter and a great example to many generations of female country and pop artists, who see Lynn as an emancipator of the country – but also as a vocal support in the back of her hardworking and sometimes brooding compatriots, husband and wife.

The way in which Lynn wrestled herself from misery, and subsequently managed to convert that misery into a masterly and resilient oeuvre, is American history.