Loretta Lynn (Photo by Russ Harrington)
10 Facts About The Late Loretta Lynn
1. She was named after child actress Loretta Young because her mom was a fan. Young won the Best Actress Oscar in 1948 for “The Farmer’s Daughter”.
2. Loretta was so poor growing up, her mom used newspapers as wallpaper. They lived in a small cabin in the mountains with eight kids, and it got cold. So her mom would glue newspapers to the wall to add a little more insulation.
3. She loved to eat rabbit and squirrel, but not possum. She talked about it in her 2004 cookbook “You’re Cookin’ It Country”. Her dad loved possum, but she didn’t care for it.
4. Loretta got married VERY young. Some sources say 15, but she told “Esquire” in 2007 that she was 13 when she married her husband Oliver Lynn. He was about six years older, and they stayed married until his death in 1996.
5. She had six kids and became a grandmother at 34. She had twins in 1964. Then two years later, her oldest daughter Betty Sue had Loretta’s first grandkid.
6. A lot of people don’t know her younger sister is Crystal Gayle. Crystal is only 71, about 19 years younger than Loretta.
7. She was good friends with Patsy Cline and claimed she used to see her ghost. She wrote about it in her 2020 book “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust”. Patsy died tragically in a plane crash in 1963.
8. She was also good friends with Sissy Spacek. They got close after Sissy played her in the 1980 film “Coal Miner’s Daughter”.
9. Keith Urban jumped out of her cake at her 87th birthday concert in 2019. When the show got announced, she joked that’s all she wanted, so he made it happen.
10. Several of Loretta’s songs got banned from the radio. The most famous was “The Pill” in 1975, because it was about contraception. But it still hit #5 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart, and #70 on the Hot 100.
Jack White produced and performed on Loretta Lynn’s 2004 album “Van Lear Rose”. They were later inducted onto the Nashville Walk of Fame together. Listen to Jack’s heartfelt tribute he posted yesterday, and some of their song “Portland, Oregon”.
