Doo helped Loretta launch her career
Loretta has always credited Doo with her career in country music. It was Doo who gave her the guitar (a $17 purchase from Sears) she used to compose her first songs. And he was the one who prodded her to perform, telling her, “You’re just as good or better as most of them girls that are singin’ and makin’ money, so let’s make us some money.” Without this encouragement, Loretta would not have acted. “I had never sang in front of anybody until my husband pushed me out there, you know,” she said on Fresh Air in 2010. “I was really bashful, and I would’ve never sang in front of anybody.”
When her first single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” came out, Doo helped with promotion. He traveled alongside Loretta as they visited radio stations attempting to get airtime for her song. “I could never have done it on my own,” she wrote in her 2002 memoir, Still Woman Enough. “Whatever else our marriage was back in them days … without Doo and his drive to get a better life, there would have been no Loretta Lynn, country singer.”
