I have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and the Union, two who enlisted with the South but finished the war fighting for the North. Many of those families, including three of my grandparents’, predate the coal industry, the Civil War, even the American Revolution. By marriage, I’m even related to Roseanne Cash, June’s stepdaughter.Īll of this is far less impressive than it sounds, because each of us-Maybelle, Loretta, my mother, me-were born along the Kentucky-Virginia border in what are now shuttered coal towns: tiny, sylvan villages in which descendants of the same families have lived and worked for hundreds of years. Mother Maybelle Carter, née Addington (my mother’s maiden name), is another cousin of mine, as is her daughter June Carter Cash. I’ve never met Loretta Lynn, but one of her third-great grandfathers, Richard Abednego “Meb” Baker, is my fourth-great, on my mom’s side, which means that not only am I related to her, but also to her younger sister, Crystal Gayle, and cousin, Patty Loveless. “It’s your baby, you rock it,” she’d say, which felt less like an exhortation than a nod to the burden every rural-born woman carries, and the perceived inevitability of that burden. As I watched the rest of the interview, I kept returning to the lyrics of an old country song my Grandma Betty would call upon to prod me toward a better attitude, to save me from being swallowed up in self-pity, and steer me toward the light. Like Lynn, I don’t live where I belong, where my people have lived for centuries I am the end of that tradition. I left the mountains of Eastern Kentucky as a young adult, one casualty of many migrations out of Appalachia that have been happening since the coal industry began its slow decline in the 1940s, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this is one of the great heartbreaks of my life. Like Lynn, I don’t live where I belong, where my people have lived for centuries.
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Even several decades later, even as the designated Queen of Country, she was still visibly affected while describing those first isolating experiences of traveling, of becoming, beyond the boundaries of home. She couldn’t return to the mountains and the self she was before she left, but she didn’t belong anywhere else. Rural Appalachian culture is, by geographical definition, distinct and relatively impenetrable from within and without, even if you’re Loretta Lynn. “It’s true,” Lynn said, and something like a shadow passed behind her eyes, a private, exiled sadness I recognized right away, the realization that one’s experience could seem otherworldly, farfetched even. Was it that Lynn’s rags-to-riches story hadn’t necessarily been a happy one? That her husband had whipped her like a child? That the reason she gave for how uncomfortable she felt around strangers-onstage, in the grocery store-was the place she came from? Re-watching the interview now, I’m left wondering which part Roseanne found amazing. “Whoa, I can’t even deal with that,” Barr said, mouth agape. “He’d usually pick up a few groceries on the way home from work.”
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“One time I went to the grocery store and was scared to death to go in,” she said.
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You gotta realize, where I come from, Roseanne, was way back in the mountains.” She went on to explain that when she and Doo moved to a logging town in Washington State, she rarely left the house. “Well, no,” Lynn answered, “because I hadn’t ever done it. “So you went onstage to sing,” she said, “because you thought he was gonna kick your butt if you didn’t?” Probing further, she asked, “You didn’t ever like it?” “Let’s put it like this,” she said, “I had four kids, and if one of ’em made a mistake-the little boogers would get into things during the day and I couldn’t whip ’em, I couldn’t whip them to save my life-I’d say, ‘Soon as your daddy comes home, he’ll kill ya, I’m gonna tell him,’ and it didn’t take but a couple times that I quit that, because when he’d come home, he’d whip them, and he’d give me one, too.”īarr seemed enamored by Lynn’s frankness, mystified by the notion that a young Loretta Webb might not have wanted to become country star Loretta Lynn. She also explained the reason why-despite the migraines she got every time-she felt compelled to perform. Lynn Jr., who also went by Mooney, Doolittle, and Doo, brought home a $17 guitar and told her to learn to play it. In a 1998 television interview with Roseanne Barr, she candidly described the earliest days of her career, when her husband, Oliver V. Loretta Lynn was a 27-year-old mother of four the first time she went onstage.