Loretta wed Oliver Lynn on January 10, 1948, when she was only 15-years-old. The pair welcomed the first four of their six children within four years. Five years after they wed, Doo bought his wife her first guitar. She taught herself to play and eventually, with the encouragement of her husband, she started her own band, Loretta and the Trailblazers.
“He’d hear me rockin’ the babies to sleep and singin’, and he said, ‘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,’” Lynn recalled of her husband in a 2011 interview.
That encouragement from Doo was all it took to set Loretta on a path to country music success where she would become known as The Coal Miner’s Daughter upon the 1971 release of the song of the same name. Despite their rocky and tumultuous marriage, Doo and Loretta made a great team and Loretta often credited her late husband for her success.
She told WBUR in 2010 that Doo kept her music career going. “I miss him so much. He kind of kept things going, like me recording. He’d always tell me how good I was, and that always helped a lot. He would say, ‘You know, we need to get a new record out,’ or whatever. He always kept me moving. And if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have been singing, period. Because he thought I could sing and he put me to work.”
