LORETTA LYNN’S SURPRISING REVELATION: UNAWARE OF BABY ORIGINS UNTIL MOTHERHOOD
As the most awarded country music singer ever, a devoted wife, and mother to six children, Loretta Lynn had an incredible journey. Born on April 14, 1932, in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, she was the second oldest of eight children. Her mother, a fan of American actress Loretta Young, named her after the actress. Loretta’s father, a coal miner, passed away at 52 due to black lung disease.
Growing up in the coal-mining hills of Kentucky, the Lynn family faced financial hardships. Loretta recalled, “The winters were cold, so my mommy glued newspapers and pages from old Sears Roebuck catalogs to the wall to help keep the cold out. We didn’t have money for wallpaper, but my mommy made that old house stay warm and beautiful.”
At the age of 16, Loretta married her first husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, who was 21 at the time. As a young stay-at-home wife, Loretta’s husband worked as a logger to support the family. They eventually moved from Kentucky to Custer, Washington, where Loretta began experiencing morning sickness without understanding the cause. Visiting her doctor, she was taken aback when he revealed she was pregnant.
“I just pulled the sheet over my head, like an ostrich. When he was done, Doc told me I could get dressed again. After that, he put his arm around my waist and he said, ’Honey, your trouble is, you’re pregnant,” Loretta explained in her book “Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
This revelation was a shock for the young and innocent Loretta, still a minor at the time. She insisted that she didn’t know what the word pregnant meant or where babies came from.
“I never knew where babies came from until it happened to me,” she once famously said.
Loretta Lynn’s first son, Jack, was born in December 1949, and his birth reflects the challenging circumstances of the Lynn family. Due to financial constraints, Loretta had to leave the hospital just hours after giving birth to Jack.
Following her second baby, Loretta experienced two miscarriages, with the second resulting in blood poisoning. Lacking the means to afford hospital care, she narrowly survived. Despite these challenges, Loretta continued to become pregnant. During her third pregnancy, doctors recommended a Cesarean section, but a legal obstacle arose—she needed her husband’s signature. Being a minor, she couldn’t sign her own consent form. After days at the hospital and unable to reach her husband, she delivered the baby naturally, and everything went well.
By the age of 20, Loretta had four children, leading a secluded life as a stay-at-home mom due to the family’s economic struggles. Despite her husband’s infidelity and alcoholism, Loretta remained devoted to him.
“I married Doo when I wasn’t but a child, and he was my life from that day on,” Lynn later wrote in her 2002 memoir, “Still Woman Enough.” “Doo was a good man and a hard worker. But he was an alcoholic, and it affected our marriage all the way through.”
The challenges and triumphs of her early marriage inspired Loretta’s songwriting. Despite enduring heartbreak, violence, and rejection, she channeled her emotions into her music, including her husband in her lyrics. Through her songs, she documented his affairs and even an incident where she confronted another woman interfering in their marriage.
According to Loretta herself: “If you can’t fight for your man, he’s not worth having.”
When asked why she didn’t leave Doo, Loretta once gave a clear answer: “I put up with it because of six kids.”
The country music queen remained in that marriage until Doolittle died in 1996, at the age of 69. His death was a difficult loss for her, and her children believed she would never recover from it.
“Three days after my husband died, I left Hurricane Mills and came to Nashville,” she said in an interview in 2000. “After being here awhile, I said to a friend of mine, ‘It seems like I’ve been here a couple of months already.’ And she said, ‘You’ve been here a year.’”
