Loretta Lynn Biography

Loretta Lynn is the country music legend whose life story, as told in her 1976 autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter, was almost as well-known as her music.

Born and raised in the poor coal mining mountains of Kentucky, she was married by the time she was 14 years old to Oliver V. “Doolittle” Lynn (who was also known as “Doo” and “Mooney”). After having six children, Loretta Lynn began singing professionally in the late 1950s.

In 1960 she had her first hit, “Honky Tonk Girl,” and by the 1970s she was the richest woman in country music, famous for her working-class appeal and the defiance shown in such songs as “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” “Before I’m Over You” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Lynn also found great success singing duets with Ernest Tubb (“Mr. and Mrs. Used To Be”) and Conway Twitty (“Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man”), and in business ventures that included a chain of western wear clothing shops, a music publishing company and a traveling rodeo show.

Her autobiography was a bestseller and was made into the movie that won Sissy Spacek an Oscar for best actress. (Tommy Lee Jones portrayed “Doo” in the film.)

Lynn took time off from her career in the 1990s to care for her ailing husband, who died in 1996. Loretta Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988, and was given Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 (in a class that also included James Brown and Carol Burnett.)

In 2004, Loretta Lynn released a critically acclaimed album, Van Lear Rose, produced by rocker Jack White of The White Stripes. It won a Grammy for best country album and produced the Grammy-winning single “Portland, Oregon.” Her last album, Still Woman Enough, was released in 2021, the year before her death.