About Loretta Lynn

Biography

“To make it in this business, you either have to be first, great or different, and I was the first to ever go into Nashville, singin’ it like the women lived it.”

Loretta Lynn has long been established as the undisputed Queen of Country Music, with more than 60 years of recording and touring to her name. A self-taught guitarist and songwriter, Lynn was one of the most distinctive performers in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s. She shook up Nashville by writing her own songs, many of which tackled boundary-pushing topics drawn from her own life experiences as a wife and mother. "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Fist City" and "Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" are just three of 16 country No. 1 singles.

She is also one of the most awarded musicians of all time. Loretta has been inducted into more music Halls of Fame than any female recording artist, including The Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and was the first woman to be named the Country Music Association's Entertainer of the Year in 1972. Lynn received Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. In 2015, she was named recipient of Billboard's inaugural Women in Music "Legend" Award. With 18 nominations spread out over every single decade for the last six decades, Lynn has won four Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and her most recent in 2019.  She has sold more than 45 million records worldwide.

In January 2021, Still Woman Enough, the American music icon’s 50th studio album (excluding her 10 studio duet collaborations with Conway Twitty) became her latest. In it she celebrates women in country music. From her homage to the originators, Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family (via her cover of “Keep On The Sunny Side”), through a new interpretation of her very first single, “I’m A Honky Tonk Girl.”

The album hit #1 in Country, #5 on Billboard’s top albums, #3 on Americana charts, #1 on Apple Music, and #1 on Amazon music when released! Her powerful vocals, six decades into her career, will still leave you both awed and delighted.

Loretta Lynn signed her first recording contract on February 1, 1960, and within a matter of weeks, she was at her first recording session. Fans fell in love with Loretta’s instantly recognizable delivery as one of the greatest country-music voices in history. No songwriter has a more distinctive body of work. In lyrics such as “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’” and “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath”, she refused to be any man’s doormat. She challenged female rivals in “You Ain’t Woman Enough” and “Fist City.” She showed tremendous blue-collar pride in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “You’re Lookin’ at Country.” She is unafraid of controversy, whether the topic is sex (“Wings Upon Your Horns”), divorce (“Rated X”), alcohol (“Wouldn’t It Be Great”) or war (“Dear Uncle Sam”). “The Pill,” her celebration of sexual liberation, was banned by many radio stations. Like the lady herself, Loretta Lynn’s songs shoot from the hip.

As millions who read her 1976 autobiography or saw its Oscar winning 1980 film treatment are aware, Loretta is a Coal Miner’s Daughter who was raised in dire poverty in a remote Appalachian Kentucky hamlet. Living in a mountain cabin with seven brothers and sisters, she was surrounded by music as a child.

“I thought everybody sang, because everybody up there in Butcher Holler did,” she recalls. “Everybody in my family sang. So I really didn’t understand until I left Butcher Holler that there were some people who couldn’t. And it was kind of a shock.”

She famously married Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn at 15 years old. “Doo” was a 21-year-old war veteran with a reputation as a hell raiser. When she was seven months pregnant with her first child, they moved far away from Appalachia to Custer, Washington. By age 20, she had four children (two more, twins, came along in 1964). Isolated from her native culture and burdened with domestic work, she turned to music for solace.