Public Memorial For Country Music's Icon & Matriarch Pioneer, Loretta Lynn (April 14, 1932-October 4, 2022)
Intro
Having my own website has it’s advantages, and one of those advantages is that I can share my personal experiences with my readers…
Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My dad played guitar and sang in a local country music cover band, so we were always listening to the radio with a blank cassette tape in the “tape deck”. The play, record, and pause buttons stayed pushed in, always ready to un-pause and record the latest Verne Gosden or George Strait song that played on the radio.
Grandma’s house was no different. There were radios playing country music within earshot everywhere you went. Inside, outside, and when you flipped up the light switch in the bathroom…SURPRISE…there was a radio playing country music.
Loretta Lynn; The Early Years
I was six years old when Sissy Spacek played the role of the late great, Loretta Lynn, in the 1980’s film “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, that tells the story of how Loretta Lynn, raised in poverty in rural Kentucky. Married at the age of 13 and with the tireless help from her husband, Oliver “Mooney” Lynn (who was played by Tommy Lee Jones), Loretta rises from local honky-tonks and small-time record deals, to national tours and hit singles, becoming a country music icon and legend.
So at a young age, that was something that I could relate to since I watched my own dad struggling to write songs and playing in and out of honky tonks and local dive bars.
Sissy Spacek played the part of Loretta Lynn while Tommy Lee Jones played Lynn’s husband.
Career
With a career that spanned over six decades, Loretta Lynn has been an icon in the Country Music World, and one of the top 10 of “Outlaw Country” pioneers, establishing her career from the bottom up with hard-hitting-hits about blue-collar women’s issues such as birth control (‘The Pill’), repeated childbirth with “One’s On the Way”, and let’s not forget about “Fist City” or “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)”.
Loretta Lynn has received many awards and accolades throughout her career. Many from the Country Music Association (CMA), the Academy of Country Music (ACM) both as a solo artist and as a duet partner in which Lynn paired with the late, great Conway Twitty. Together they had five consecutive No. 1 hits between 1971 & 1975, which include “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man”. She was nominated 18 times for a Grammy and won three times.
As of 2022, Loretta Lynn was the most awarded female recording artist, and the only female ACM Artist of the Decade (1970’s). She scored 24 number 1 hit singles and 11 number 1 albums. She ended 57 years of touring on the road after she suffered a stroke in 2017 and broke her hip in 2018. 2022 marked her 60th year as a Grand Ole Opry member.
R.I.P
She died in her sleep at her home in Hurricane Mills on October 4, 2022, at the age of 90. She was buried October 7, 2022, on her Hurricane Mills Ranch beside her husband, Oliver Lynn.
While most of my graduating class headed to the beaches for “Senior Trip”, I headed to Memphis, Nashville, and Gatlinburg for mine before heading to USMCRD San Diego. Hurricane Mills and Loretta Lynn’s Ranch was among the many stops along the way…
