BIOGRAPHY: Top US journalists confirm country singer, Loretta Lynn, has died

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Top US journalists confirm, Loretta Lynn, has died. (Read More Here).

 THE beloved singer and songwriter whose seven-decade career broke down barriers for women in country music, died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90. Lynn’s publicist confirmed her death to Rolling Stone.

“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” Lynn’s family said in a statement.

In the 1960s, Lynn’s trailblazing country chart-toppers established the model of the female country star as an independent woman who stands her ground against cheating men and no-good homewreckers with unflagging, good-natured spirit. Lynn adapted her autobiographical 1970 hit “Coal Miner’s Daughter” into a bestselling biography, which was later made into an Oscar-winning film, introducing the story of a hardscrabble upbringing in Depression-era Kentucky that Lynn celebrated to people who never even listened to country music.

“So sorry to hear about my sister, friend Loretta,” tweeted Dolly Parton, who joined Lynn and Tammy Wynette on the 1993 album Honky Tonk Angels. “We’ve been like sisters all the years we’ve been in Nashville and she was a wonderful human being, wonderful talent, had millions of fans and I’m one of them.”

Lambert, who recorded a version of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” with Lynn for a 2010 tribute, praised her “authentic, no-holds-barred country songs” in 2015 and called her “one of my biggest heroes … one of the strongest women in music.“

Loretta Webb was born in 1932 in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, where her father Ted worked in the Van Lear coal mines until his death in 1959. Lynn was the second of eight children, three of whom (most successfully Crystal Gayle) would also go on to pursue country music as a career. In 1948, she married Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, who was also the singer’s manager. (In Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta claimed she was 13 when she married Lynn, though in 2012 the Associated Press found her marriage license, suggesting that she was 16.)

“Doo” left behind his past running moonshine when the newlyweds moved off to the logging camps of Custer, Washington, where Lynn took in laundry, picked strawberries, and started having children. “I didn’t know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child five years later,” she later quipped.

The family made its own entertainment – her mother played guitar, with her father accompanying on banjo – and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family.

“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the Associated Press in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep.

“He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.'”

At the age of 15, she attended a “pie social” – where local girls would bake a pie, and men would bid to win both the food and a meeting with the cook.

Loretta’s pie, accidentally baked with salt instead of sugar, was won by Oliver Lynn, a 21-year-old solider, who swept her off her feet. A month later, they married and moved to Custer, Washington, where they raised four children.

Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle,” urged her to sing professionally and bought her a $17 (£15) Sears guitar, with which she started a band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, that also featured her brother Jay Lee Webb.

By 1960, she had signed a contract with Zero Records and released her debut single, I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.

The song was inspired by a woman Lynn befriended in Washington, whose husband had left her for another woman. Lynn said she wrote the song while leaning up against an old toilet in her house, the words pouring out of her in a 10-minute burst of inspiration.

She and her husband promoted the song relentlessly, driving to radio stations around the country to pester DJs into playing it, and sending out hundreds of free discs.

The effort paid off. I’m A Honky Tonk Girl reached number 14 on the country charts, and Lynn relocated to Nashville, where she was quickly snapped up by Decca Records.

She released her first Decca record, Success, in 1962, beginning an impressive stretch of hits that continued into the 1990s.

Lynn earned her first number one with Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind) in 1966, and topped the US country charts another 15 times.

She recorded 60 albums in total, and was nominated for 18 Grammy Awards, winning three.

Her songs frequently depicted broken relationships and unhappy homes – but were unusual for expressing a female point of view at a time when that was unheard of in country music.

Many addressed Doolittle’s infidelity and alcoholism. You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man) and Fist City were feisty warnings to any woman who considered approaching her husband, while 1971’s I Wanna Be Free fantasised about divorce.

“I’m gonna take this chain from around my finger / And throw it just as far as I can sling,” sang Lynn.

“I’ve wrote every song I ever wrote about him,” she told a BBC Arena documentary. “He gave me a lot of opportunities.”