The country singer's mom was a fan of Loretta Young, who won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Farmer's Daughter.
Loretta's family was so poor that her mother glued newspapers and pages from old Sears Roebuck catalogs to the wall to keep the cold out. "We didn't have money for wallpaper," Loretta would later say, "but my mommy made that old house stay warm and beautiful."
"Coal Miner's Daughter" tells the true story of Lynn's life growing up in rural Kentucky "in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler", while her father, Melvin "Ted" Webb, worked all night in the Van Lear coal mine. In the song's final verse, the now-adult Lynn returns to her homestead, which has since been abandoned: (Not much left but the floor, nothing lives here anymore ... except the memory of a coal miner's daughter)
On January 10, 1948, 15-year-old Loretta Webb married Oliver Vanetta Lynn, better known as "Doolittle", "Doo", or "Mooney". They had met only a month earlier. The Lynns left Kentucky and moved to the logging community of Custer, Washington, when Loretta was seven months pregnant with the first of their six children.
Loretta's husband, Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, bought her a $17 Gibson guitar from Sears & Roebuck a few years (and a couple of kids) into their marriage. Loretta taught herself to play and quickly began writing her own songs.
With Doolittle's encouragement, she started her own band, Loretta and the Trailblazers, with her brother Jay Lee playing lead guitar. She often appeared at Bill's Tavern in Blaine, Washington, and the Delta Grange Hall in Custer, Washington.
The "Coal Miner's Daughter" lost her father, Melvin Theodore Webb, to black lung disease just one year before the release of her first single, "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl," in 1960.
Patsy helped Loretta navigate the not-so-female-friendly country music world until her sudden death in 1963. Loretta would later tell Entertainment Weekly: "When Patsy died, my God, not only did I lose my best girlfriend, but I lost a great person that was taking care of me. I thought, 'Now somebody will whip me for sure.'"
"They say to have her hair done, Liz flies all the way to France
And Jackie's seen in a Discotecque doin' a brand new dance
And the White House social season should be glitterin' an' gay
But here in Topeka the rain is a fallin'
The faucet is a drippin' and the kids are a bawlin'
One of 'em a toddlin' and one is a crawlin'
And one's on the way"
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