Loretta Lynn “Loretty”

My father was a football coach, who did not have time for music or much of anything else besides football, but one day, in Ames, Iowa, when he was coaching for the Iowa State Cyclones, he brought home a little 45 RPM record called “Sweet Thang” with Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb on the label. Maybe football practice was short that day or it was an off-week, but for Dad to bring home a record to play for us kids was unheard of when there was Nebraska and Oklahoma to beat.

Mom was the music person. She taught piano lessons and sang classical music with the Ames Choral Society and later joined the Iowa State Chorus. She’d leave the babies, Casey and Keely, with the babysitter so she could go to rehearsal in the mornings.

But she did not like country music. She made it clear that it was for commoners. She kicked off the dust of her childhood home in Mexico, Missouri, and she wasn’t about to raise kids on country music.

But Dad loved it. He called us into the living room that day to play “Sweet Thang” on Mom’s pristine Yahama stereo that you had to press down upon to open the lid, and it unlatched with a neat click.

“Y’all kids get in here and listen to this song! It’s funny as hell!” I remember him calling. He even needed to put a little plastic insert into the middle of this tiny record to make it play on Mom’s stereo.

When Mom had first gotten her new console stereo a few years earlier, which also had storage space for records, my brother, Duffy, and I couldn’t figure out how to open it. We were five and six. Mom was napping with the new baby, and we wanted to play a record. We pushed and tugged at the lid. Nothing worked. So we tried to pry it open with a fork. That didn’t work either, and when Mother discovered our handiwork, she nearly lost her mind at the chipped wood from those fork indentations.

We were banned from going near the stereo until we were older.

But all was forgiven a few years later when Dad brought home “Sweet Thang.” I remember him getting so tickled at the lyrics, and he would just laugh and shake his head. He played it several times, and he let me play it over and over too. I imagined the man sneaking out of the house at sundown, while the lady was washing her hair. It was a song with a story, a narrative that I could follow, and I could feel this woman’s rage when she goes to find her husband in the bar. It was funny and real — I’d never heard a song with a story before except for Catholic hymns, and they didn’t have the drama of “Sweet Thang.” Dad tried to sing along with Loretta and Ernest, but he couldn’t carry a tune.

Did Mom yell, “STOP!”

With four kids ages seven and under, she probably did.

I can’t remember if more Loretta Lynn albums filled our home. Maybe one or two along with “A Taste of Honey,” which was more Mom’s style.

Cue Herb Albert and the Tiajuana Brass.

My second Loretta story came in high school. My friend, Pattie, and I were both new to Knoxville, Tennessee, and we were homesick for our “real” homes. She had moved from Miami, and I had moved from Pittsburgh. Dad went from coaching the Pittsburgh Panthers to the Tennessee Volunteers. Pattie and I were students at Knoxville Catholic, the only Catholic school in town on Magnolia Avenue in East Knoxville.

We joined the CYO, a Catholic Youth Group, that went on trips to the Smoky Mountains, visited old folks, and volunteered to babysit at Sunday Mass. Anyway, Pattie was so much fun and a bright spot, my first real best friend, and we learned there was going to be a talent show celebrating the new gymnasium at Sacred Heart School.

Dour Father Julius, the principal, wanted to christen the new gymnasium the “Retreat Center,” but it had a basketball court, so nobody was going to call it a “Retreat Center.”

There was no formal practice for the Talent Show held one evening in the springtime. We just gave the sound guy our records, and he played them, and somehow there was a fairly good crowd to celebrate the new gym and watch kids perform.

Pattie was a ballerina, so she decided to dance in her toe shoes with a parasol to Jennifer Brewer’s song, “Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl.” It’s a mix of sweet verses with a raunchy chorus, and if you can imagine a redhead twirling across the stage, all joy and light, and then shimmying and shaking it hard to the chorus. She stole the show, and I thought it was the most brilliant and inspired piece of dance ever performed.

I decided to sing a Loretta Lynn song, and I thought the funniest one was “One’s on the Way.” There’s even a monologue in the middle where the husband calls home to utter chaos and eventually hangs up on the wife. So I stuffed a pillow under my dress, messed up my hair, and sang the song because I could match Loretta’s pitch. I was petrified waiting to go on and then once I was up on stage, I trusted Loretta’s words and sang the story.

After it was over, everyone congratulated us, but we heard later from Pattie’s mom that Father Julius was not pleased and claimed our performances showed loose morals, promoted teen pregnancy, and had no place in a Catholic talent show.

It was so interesting to hear this news, not upsetting, but shocking and kind of exciting. We had no idea we had been rebellious. It was kind of wonderful since we were considered “good girls.”

But when the film, Coalminer’s Daughter came out, that sealed the deal, and I fell in love with Loretta for life watching Sissy Spacek play her to perfection. I played that album all the time and watched the movie and dragged friends to see it. I’ve watched it so many times that I can and have quoted lines back and forth many times with beloved friends, Michael and Jim, from my theatre days, who love Loretta too. I also sang all her songs for my freshman-year roommate, Nicki, who preferred Pat Benatar, Barbra Streisand, and Air Supply, but somehow was amused by my late-night Loretta performances.

I adored Beverly DeAngelo’s performance as Patsy Cline in Coalminer’s Daughter and always felt bad she didn’t get to play Patsy in Sweet Dreams when the role went to Jessica Lange. I even wrote a play about Loretta, Pasty and all of them called kd lang and me about a Nashville housewife who falls in love with kd lang. And I loved how kd lang brought them all together to sing a Honky Tonk Angels Medly — Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, Brenda Lee, and kd lang.

My kids grew up on Coalminer’s Daughter, and they loved it too, even if they didn’t have much of a choice.

On September 10, 2001, I took my ten-year-old, Lucy, to see Loretta perform at a venue in Orange County, California. We drove all the way on a Monday night, a school night even because I wanted her to see Loretta in person. There were tables on this balcony overlooking the stage. I sat in a chair and Lucy sat under the table pressed up against the bars of the balcony, watching Loretta sing. We played her music all the way home.

The next morning, the world changed when the planes flew into the towers. I kept thinking about Loretta and the concert the night before when everything seemed so normal and sweet and easy.

During the dark days and years following 9/11, I looked at my kids and thought of my husband, Kiffen, growing up one of 13 children. And I began to write my first children’s novel, Gentle’s Holler, and there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about Butcher Holler writing that book. I kept thinking about those mountains as I tried to write about a little girl who wants to write songs and see the world beyond Maggie Valley, North Carolina. I imagined my own sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, growing up and writing songs, and so my character, Livy Two Weems, was kind of a combination of Tomi Lynn and Loretta.

Three of my sisters-in-law used to sing with their father, Jim Lunsford, in a singing group simply called, The Lunsfords. Jim sadly died long ago at the age of fifty of a heart attack, but I often wish my sisters-in-law would make an album. They still sing together to this day at family weddings and funerals and parties, and they are so good. I also learned that Tomi Lynn and her sisters, Nancy and Teresa, and Jim, were guests on something called “The Bill Robinson Show” with Loretta. Upon hearing of her death, Nancy wrote, “I remember Loretta coming out to chat with fans while her hair was still in rollers. What a down-to-earth mountain girl. May she rest in peace.”

Jim Lunsford was a fiddle player on the Grand Ole Opry and played with Reno and Smiley and the Smoky Mountain Boys, and CharleyPride even recorded some of his songs, including “Blue Ridge Mountains Turning Green.”

Here is a song that Tomi wrote for her mother, Frances, who died last year and raised 13 children, and 8 were still kids at home when Jim died. When she died in July of 2021 in Nashville, Kiffen and two of our three adult children were there, Lucy and Norah, along with many siblings and nieces and nephews, celebrating and loving Frances. As she lay dying and even after she was gone, they sang her favorite hymns around her bed for hours, and when the funeral home came, they walked her outside into the night singing, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” I later asked Lucy if it felt like a dream, and she said, “I don’t think I could ever dream anything that real.”

When I was on a book tour in Alabama in 2007 with my dear late friend, Sally Nemeth, also on her book tour, we explored Birmingham together, a place I knew nothing about then, and Sally took me everywhere. She had to move to Alabama when she was in high school like I had to move to Tennessee, and we bonded over difficult uprootings as young teens from the North to the South.

As a fifteen-year-old, Sally came home from her first day at the local public high school in Mountain Brook and asked her mother, “What’s a sorority?” and burst into tears.

On our exploration of Birmingham that day, we came upon Loretta Lynn’s empty tour bus and I took a picture of Sally in front of the bus. We both wrote Loretta love notes of gratitude and stuck them on the bus window.

I don’t know if she ever got them.

When my father became ill with dementia a few years ago, I played him “Sweet Thang” and his face lit up listening to the song again. I also played him, Freddie Fender, because he loved to dance around with Mom in Knoxville on the shag carpet to “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” when they threw parties for the other coaches and their wives in the rec room that had a pool table and a wet bar with pictures of mascots, National Championship plaques, and pompoms as the decor.

The day after Dad died, it was strange to wake up in a world without him. It felt like somebody had torn out a piece of the sky.

I counted on him to be here.

I want to tell him about Loretta. I want to talk to Sally about Loretta, too, about the time we came upon her empty tour bus in Birmingham out of the blue. Sally died not long after Dad of cancer a little over a year ago, which is still something that is so unfair and something I hate because I miss her, and I can’t quite believe it yet. She should still be here. And I counted on Loretta too — to stay.

But part of me will forever imagine Loretta right up there in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, or on her ranch in Tennessee, singing her songs. Sometimes over the years, especially when I need to remind myself how to be brave and hang in there, I watch Coalminer’s Daughter and remember everything Loretta ever gave me with her music and stories.

Sally Nemeth in Birmingham, Alabama holding our books by Loretta’s tour bus in 2007.