Loretta Lynn, ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ icon and country singer, dead at 90
Country music legend Loretta Lynn has died at the age of 90.
The four-time Grammy winner — whose glittering career spanned six decades — passed away Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.
Her family confirmed the news in a statement provided to the Associated Press, but did not disclose a cause of death.
Lynn — who was raised in rural Kentucky — became a worldwide sensation with her 1971 track “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
The singer-songwriter — whose own father worked in a coal mine — used her poverty-stricken Appalachian childhood as the basis for dozens of her hit songs.
The Country Music Hall of Famer also wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control — and sometimes faced censorship from radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.
Lynn’s other hits included “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “You’re Looking at Country.”
Lynn was born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky in 1932 — the second of eight children. Her father died at the age of 52 from black-lung disease which was caused by long-term exposure to coal dust.
At the age 15, she married Oliver Vanetta Lynn, taking his surname and officially becoming Loretta Lynn.
Soon after, the couple left Kentucky and moved to Washington state, where the turbulent early years of their marriage inspired Lynn to start songwriting.
At the age of 21, Oliver bought Lynn her first guitar, which she taught herself to play over a period of three years. Lynn was already a mom to four young children at the time, juggling domestic duties with her newfound passion for music.
Lynn eventually began playing in local taverns and soon became a popular figure in the Washington state country music scene. In 1960, at the age of 28, she cut her first record: “I’m A Honky Tonk Girl.”
Lynn and her family relocated to Nashville, where she continued to chart her rise as a prominent female figure in country music. She welcomed twins in 1964, becoming a mom of six.
The plucky songstress often pushed boundaries, writing about birth control in her track “The Pill” and the Vietnam War draft in the ballad “Dear Uncle Sam.” Country music radio stations banned 14 of her songs, according to the Daily Beast.
Lynn also wrote about her troubled marriage, with her husband allegedly cheating on her regularly, although they never divorced. He died in 1996.
In 1971 — the same year that she released “Coal Miner’s Daughter — the star scooped her first Grammy Award. Five years later, she penned her best-selling memoir of the same name which was subsequently turned into an Oscar-winning movie starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones in 1980.
The Academy of Country Music chose Lynn as the artist of the decade for the 1970s and she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988.
She continued to perform across the country in the 1990s and 2000s, even scooping an additional two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose.” In 2010, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for her 50 years in country music.
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2013.
Lynn is survived by four of her six children, as well as 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.
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