Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter

by Loretta Lynn;George Vecsey

  We still lend our old house out to relatives. They keep a guest book for my fans to sign. There’s been people from almost every state in the nation, which ain’t easy because there aren’t any signs marking Butcher Holler. You’ve just got to ask directions, if you can find anybody to ask. The old house is falling apart now, the floor sagging and stuff. But they’ve still got my old bed and other furniture and some day I’m gonna put it all in the museum I’m building on the ranch.

  My folks don’t make a big fuss over me in Butcher Holler. They knew me when I was wearing flour sacks, so I ain’t no big deal to them. I can go back there and we’ll talk just the same way we always did—tell snake stories and ghost stories, believing about half of it.

  Somebody wrote a story saying I should pay to have the road paved so people can drive up easier. I won’t do it, and I’ll tell you why. The only reason people ever heard of Butcher Holler was because I put it on the map. It’s just a little place. If my Daddy were alive today, he’d say I shouldn’t pave it. He’d know better. I waded out of the mud when I left Butcher Holler and when I go back to visit I wade through the mud again. They don’t need no pavement.

  We didn’t even have cars when I was living there. When I was born, there was no sense in going to the hospital. We couldn’t afford it anyway, not with the Depression going on. So we had this old woman, Old Aunt Harriet, around eighty years old, come to deliver me. She was almost blind, Mommy said, and she had to feel with her fingers where to cut the cord. Daddy had to sell our milk cow, Old Goldy, to pay thirty-five dollars to Old Aunt Harriet so she’d stay two weeks with Mommy.

  After I was born, Mommy put me in the crib in the corner. We just had this one-room cabin they made from logs, with the cracks filled with moss and clay. The wind used to whistle in so bad, Mommy would paper the walls with pages from her Sears and Roebuck catalog and movie magazines. I remember I could see pictures of Hitler, Clark Gable, and that Russian man—Stalin, is that his name?—and a picture of a beautiful woman with earphones on her head—a telephone operator. I never forgot how pretty she looked. Mommy never went to the movies, but she always liked pictures of Loretta Young and Claudette Colbert. Right over my crib she pasted pictures of them two stars. That’s how I got my name. Lots of times I wonder if I would have made it in country music if I was named Claudette.

  When I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president for several years. That’s the closest I’m gonna come to telling my age in this book, so don’t go looking for it. I’m trying to make a living singing songs. I don’t need nobody out there saying, “She don’t look bad considering she’s such-and-such years old.”

  One time on television, somebody asked my age and I said it was none of his business unless he was selling insurance or taking the census. Then he asked me what year I was born in—and I told him! Afterward, my husband said I must be the dumbest person in the whole United States. Well, I may be dumb but I ain’t stupid, at least not anymore. Now I’ve learned not to give away my age.

  I was born on April 14, which I think is important because I believe in horoscopes. I was born under the sign of the Ram, which means I’m headstrong, don’t like people telling me what to do. That’s the truth. I listen to ’em, but if they’re wrong I just do what I think is right.

  Mommy says I started to walk and talk around eleven months old, before I took sick. I had an ear infection called mastoiditis. The only way they could cure it was by drilling holes in my head to clean out the infection. They done this every day, then put cotton right into the holes. I had curly blond hair up until that time, but they cut off all of them curls so they could fix the infection. Mommy couldn’t afford to keep me in the hospital overnight, so every day she’d walk with me the ten miles to Golden Rule Hospital in Paintsville, so they could scrape the infection. I’ve still got the scars from the drilling around my ears, which is why I wear my hair so long. It got so bad that people didn’t think I was gonna live. Mommy got a letter from a woman a few years ago that said, “Whatever happened to that little girl that was gonna die?” Mommy wrote back and said that little girl is still alive today. But I didn’t start walking again until I was four years old. I must have stayed in bed for years, but I don’t remember none of it. I shut it all out, I guess.

  I avoid going back through places where there’s too much poverty. I wouldn’t take nothing for the memories of what I went through—but I don’t want to go back to it. I remember being hungry too much. I think maybe it’s worse today, because people know they’re poor from watching television news and stuff. Back then, we didn’t know we were poor, and people were more proud then.

  It bothers me to go back to Kentucky and see folks on welfare today because I know how hard my Daddy worked to keep us alive during the Depression. Being poor really helped me. The country is making a big mistake by not teaching kids how to cook and raise a garden and build fires. It’s like the Indian taught the white man how to survive. Do you think our kids could take an ear of corn and beat it up fine to make bread? I’ve done it. And I could do it again.

  2

  Daddy

  Daddy never took a handout,

  We ate pinto beans and bacon,

  But he worked to keep the wolf back from the door.…

  —“They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy,” by Jerry Chesnut

  A few years ago, a fellow named Jerry Chesnut offered me a song called, “They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy.” All I heard was the title, and I knew I just had to make that record, because that’s how I feel about my Daddy, who died when he was a young man, around fifty-one years old. He had high blood pressure, and that worries me a lot because the doctors told me recently that I’ve got high blood pressure sometimes. Also, I have migraines, just like my Daddy.

  Even though he died before I ever got started singing, in 1959, I feel like Daddy’s been the most important person in my life. I’m very close to Mommy, too, and though Doolittle has just about raised me since I was a girl, I had almost fourteen years of Daddy giving me love and security, the way a daddy should. He’d sit and hold me on his lap while he rocked by the fireplace. I think Daddy is the main reason why I always had respect for myself when times got rough between me and Doolittle—I knew my Daddy loved me.

  My worst feelings in my life were over leaving Daddy to go West. I didn’t see him before he died, which makes me cry even today. I’ve often thought, if I could live my life over, I would tell him how much I loved him. Kids don’t tell their parents. It’s a shame, but it’s true. My kids don’t tell me that. I know they love me, but they don’t put it into words. So that’s what I try to do with some of my songs—to tell kids to love their parents while they’re still around.

  That song that Jerry Chesnut wrote tells about my Daddy, even though it’s about a great big man, and Daddy was only about five feet, eight inches, and weighed around 117 pounds.

  We’ve got some pictures of Daddy, and he’s usually got this straight face on him, not much emotion. Mountain people are like that. It’s hard to read ’em if you don’t know ’em. He was real shy, not like people from the coal camps who are used to talking with each other. But Butcher Holler was his kind of world. There, he was the greatest man you ever saw. He could fix anything with those wiry arms of his. He could hammer up a well box, or a fence for the hog, or a new outhouse. You had to do things for yourself in the hollers or you’d die.

  Daddy’s name was Melvin—Melvin Webb—but everybody called him “Ted.” His daddy and mommy lived in Butcher Holler; she was a Butcher, from the first family that settled up there. One of Daddy’s grandmothers was a full-blooded Cherokee squaw, and it’s the same on my mother’s side. So that means I’m one-quarter Cherokee—and proud of it. Other kids called me “half-breed” when I was a kid, but it didn’t bother me. Being Indian was no big deal one way or the other. A lot of blood was mixed up in the hollers, if the truth be known. I was always proud of being Indian—and I’ve gotten more proud as the years go on.


  Daddy didn’t go to school much, but he could read and write some. He worked out-of-doors when he was young, farming and stuff. When he was about twenty, he met Mommy at the little church in the holler. They courted for around two years and then got married. They built their own little one-room wood cabin at the end of the holler. She would hold the boards and he would drive in the nails. Right after the Depression started, they began having kids—eight of them, four boys and four girls, in the next sixteen years. I was next to the oldest.

  Daddy couldn’t get much work during the Depression, and we didn’t have money. I remember one Christmas when Daddy had only thirty-six cents for four children. Somehow, he managed to buy a little something for each of us down at the general store. He gave me a little plastic doll about three inches high, and I loved that like it was my own baby.

  Daddy was more easygoing than Mommy. She did most of the correcting in the family. The only time Daddy would get mad was when someone would smart off at Mommy. Then he’d move right in there and settle it. He wasn’t one of those men that’s gone half the time either—he didn’t have no bad habits. He was always teasing Mommy, but in a nice way. If she got mad about something, he’d laugh and say, “The Squaw’s on the warpath tonight.” I never forgot that line, and I wrote a song about it when I got older. But you know—the nice way he treated her gave me ideas about the way I wanted to be treated. I still feel there’s better ways to handle a woman than whipping her into line. And I make that point clear in my songs, in case you hadn’t noticed.

  Daddy was upset when he couldn’t find work in the lumber mills during the Depression. He was used to working hard. They didn’t have stuff like welfare checks in those days, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the WPA (somebody told me that stands for Work Projects Administration), which gave men jobs. This is why you go into homes back in Kentucky today and you’ll see pictures of FDR on the wall. Daddy would work a few days on the roads with a WPA crew and come home with a few dollars, as proud as could be. When he wasn’t working on the roads, he worked on his big garden and patched the house to get us through the Depression.

  The WPA took care of me, too. The agent came up the holler and gave me a real “store-boughten” dress when I was around seven years old. Up to that time, all I wore was flour sacks Mommy sewed up as dresses. I kept looking at pictures in the Sears and Roebuck catalog and thinking how pretty everyone looked—but I never figured I’d get a chance to look pretty, too.

  But one day this agent brought this little blue dress with pink flowers and dainty little pockets. Mercy, how I loved it. Daddy kept saying, “Don’t get your dress dirty.” I took good care of it and put it in the laundry bag, but we let our family hog run loose and he snatched that dress and just chewed it to pieces. Ruined it, he did. I must have cried for days.

  When the Depression got better, Daddy saved enough money to buy a house with four rooms in it. It was down the holler, next to his folks, in a big, broad clearing. This is the family house you see in the pictures, with the high porch facing the garden and the hill rearing up behind the house. We had a spring behind the house for fresh water and a well in front. We had a new outhouse in the back. In the winter, you’d wait too long because you didn’t want to go outside in the cold. And then you’d have to run through the snow, hoping you’d make it to the outhouse. We still didn’t have electricity, and our bunch of kids still had to sleep on pallets in the living room at night. But we had four rooms instead of one, and we really thought we’d arrived.

  Finally, the mines got to working again, and Daddy decided to support his family as a coal miner. He never worked in the mines before, and it must have taken a lot of nerve to go into that terrible dark hole. But Daddy did it for us.

  He worked at Consolidated Number Five, right down the holler. The seam of coal was only three feet high, and you can bet they didn’t bother cutting the rock to give the men a place to stand up. That meant the miners had to crawl on their hands and knees and work on their sides or lying on their backs. Some of the miners wore knee pads, like the basketball players wear, but Daddy found that they raised him up so high that his back rubbed against the roof as he crawled into the mine. So he would come home every night with his knees all cut and sore, and he’d soak them in hot water before he could go to sleep. But the next morning he’d be out working in the garden again, until it was time to go to the mine.

  Daddy worked the night shift. He left home around four o’clock every afternoon and walked down the holler. We kids, we hardly said good-bye to him. But looking back, I can see the worried look on Mommy’s face. She would keep busy with the kids all afternoon and evening. She had her hands full. But after we were in bed, she would sit by the kerosene lamp and read her Bible or an old Western book until she heard Daddy coming up the steps. They’d lie in bed talking, but I never heard him complain about the mines. Coal miners are funny that way. They don’t like to get their wives upset. I remember when that Hyden mine blew up in Kentucky, on December 30, 1970, and I got myself in a big jam trying to raise money for those coal miners’ kids’ education—I’ll tell more about that later on in this book. Some of those widows testified later that their husbands had warned them about the dangerous blasting they were doing in the mine. But the wives knew enough not to ask any questions, or else their husbands would have been laid off. I feel real proud of Daddy for working in the mines. He kept his family alive by breaking his own body down. That’s the only way to look at it.

  In the coal fields, you were never far from a disaster. When I was little, there was a big explosion in a mine above Van Lear that killed a lot of men. Other times, men would get killed in single accidents. I’ve walked past the mine when they were bringing out the men who were in a gas explosion. I remember all the women and children standing around, mostly crying. When I heard about the Hyden disaster, I could just picture those poor people huddled around a fire waiting for word about their men. That’s what life is like whenever your man is a coal miner. I guess that’s why I’m so soft on coal miners. I call my band “The Coal Miners,” and whenever I meet a guy at one of my concerts who says he was a coal miner, why, my eyes just get full of tears because I know how those men suffer.

  Like I said before, my Daddy had high blood pressure and migraine headaches. I’ve seen him walk the floor many a night, crying from the pain. But when you’re a kid, you don’t think about it. One time they wrapped Daddy up in an old quilt Mommy made out of overalls and took him down the holler on an old wooden sled. Somebody said to me, “Your Daddy won’t be back.” I didn’t really understand what they meant. But after some time in the hospital, he came back. He couldn’t catch a cold or he’d get real sick. He’d get up every morning and light a fire, so he wouldn’t get sick. And when Daddy started getting that regular miner’s paycheck again, he would drag home groceries on a wooden sled he built himself.

  After he worked in the mines for a few years, he had trouble breathing. The doctors used to say that a miner was “nervous” or that he smoked too much. They didn’t know about black lung in those days. Black lung is what you get when you breathe in too much coal dust. It never leaves your lungs—just stays there and clogs up your breathing, puts extra strain on your heart.

  They used to tell the miners that coal dust was good for you, that it helped ward off colds. Or they’d tell a miner he would get sicker from dirty sheets than from working in a coal mine—lots of stupid things, but nobody knew any better then.

  Sometimes Daddy didn’t take a bath before he came home, and all you could see was the whites of his eyes. Well, if that coal dust could stick to his face like that, it must have gotten into his lungs, too. But it wasn’t until some time after Daddy died that the miners just plumb refused to work unless the government paid them benefits. And all the time, England and other European countries was paying off their miners with black lung. I’ve got relatives collecting black lung benefits today, but it came too late for Daddy. He got laid off when he couldn’t work
fast anymore. They just said, “Take your shovel and go home.” No pension, no benefits, just “go home.” This was after I moved away, but Mommy wrote me a letter. They tried running a grocery store, but that didn’t work out because some people came down to get groceries but didn’t pay him. He left the world owing nobody anything, but a lot of people owed him.

  A few years later, the company closed down the entire mine where Daddy worked: bricked it right over. But after I got into show business, I asked them to find my Daddy’s old mining equipment. They had cemented all the old equipment inside the old bath house, but they broke in just for me and found an old carbide lamp and my cousin’s safety helmet, which I’m going to put in the museum on my ranch. But they never found Daddy’s old miner’s cap or his identification tag. I’m pretty superstitious about things like that and curious about what could have happened to his stuff.

  I remember after World War II, Daddy saving up enough money for a battery-operated Philco radio. I’ll never forget him pulling that radio up the holler on his sled and putting it in the corner of the living room, so proud of himself. It was the first radio we ever owned. I was eleven years old. Daddy didn’t let us run it all the time because he wanted to save the batteries for Saturday night, when he was off from work. He would sit there by the grate, where it was warm, and turn on Lowell Thomas and the news. I still hear that great deep voice of Lowell Thomas today, and it makes me think of Daddy. Then we’d get our favorite radio program of all—The Grand Ole Opry, direct from Nashville, Tennessee.