Loretta Lynn, the coal miner’s daughter and moonshiner’s wife who became one of American country music’s biggest stars and a leading feminist, died on Tuesday at the age of 90, her family said on Twitter.
Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, the family said in a statement posted on Twitter.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the statement said.
In the male-dominated world of country music in the 1960s and ’70s, Lynn built a reputation as a hillbilly feminist who was bold enough and talented enough to write her own songs. In “Rated X” she sang about the inequities of man-woman relationships and her song “The Pill” celebrated the sexual freedom that birth control gave women. She also sang about philandering husbands – a subject she knew about personally.
Lynn told an interviewer that 14 of her songs had been banned by radio stations.
“I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” she told Esquire magazine in 2007. “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about. The rest were afraid to.”
Lynn’s down-home twangy voice was a regular feature on country music radio and honky-tonk juke boxes in the 1960s and ’70s as she scored hits with songs such as “Fist City,” “Don’t Come Home a’Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” and the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” According to her website, Lynn had more than 50 top-10 hits.
