Country music pioneer Loretta Lynn has passed away at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. In a statement her family and her manager confirmed that she died in her sleep on October 4th, 2022 at the age of 90. She was known the world over for her strong voice and her stellar songwriting skills, two facets that made her a country music legend. Even into her final years she was still recording and performing live, something many musicians find hard to do. She only stopped touring a few years before her death due to suffering a stroke followed by a broken hip and was still occasionally performing live up until a year before she passed away.
Her life was far from an easy one as she grew up with a number of struggles, then had a heap of them well into her adulthood. It was these everyday problems, both big and small, that she threaded through her music and which made her songs so relatable to the rest of us.
She was born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1932. Like many breadwinners in the area her father was a coal miner, which meant that her family rarely any money to spare for luxuries. She wrote about this extensively in her book, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and sung about it in the song of the same name.
The lyrics recall her family living in a cabin, her father not only working as a miner, but also farming during the day and selling a hog on the side to afford new shoes for the kids when the weather turned cold. As she put it, “Daddy always managed to get the money from somewhere.” The 1980 film (also titled Coal Miner’s Daughter) chronicled the hardships of her family life and became an instant classic.
