Loretta Lynn’s life is among the best-chronicled in country music history. Her humble beginnings, her early marriage, her days spent raising children when she was still a child herself, her first tentative steps into country music, her close friendship with Patsy Cline, her rise to superstardom culminated by her 1988 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the Hollywood movie made about her life are the major elements of Lynn’s stranger-than-fiction biography.
Regarded as “bigger than life” in many circles, she was even awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 2013. But in a lot of ways she’s just plain Loretta, a representation of the everyday blue-collar woman.
Loretta Lynn was born in Butcher Hollow (she pronounced it “holler”), a small coal-mining community located near the Eastern Kentucky town of Paintsville. She grew up in absolute poverty. After her marriage at 15 (not 13 as legend has it), she left the area for the state of Washington where her husband Mooney had found work.
