Sometimes Corman is so shy that he won’t even look me in the face, or talk one word to me. But if I threaten to whup him, Corman gets as nice as can be. The last time I was there, Corman told me he knew Daddy was going to die the night before he did. Corman said he was walking in the darkness, when he saw something yellow in the woods, like a spaceship almost, but not moving. Corman said when they brought Daddy back for the funeral, he knew then that it was no spaceship, but rather it was Daddy’s coffin—with the yellow flowers. Like I said, we’ve got a kind of extrasensory perception, ESP, in my family, but it also goes along with being mountain people. Maybe it’s from not being so busy with books and television and other people. We can feel things going around in the air.
You can say that’s crazy if you want. But I know I’ve got ESP. It’s like I can always tell how my oldest daughter Betty is feeling. If I dream that I’m whipping Betty, I know she’s in trouble. Or I’ll see her crying and call her on the telephone and say, “Betty Sue, what’s the matter—aren’t you taking your medicine?” And it’ll turn out she’s feeling sick.
Now Doolittle says I’m crazy to believe these things, but I believe ’em. I believe in reincarnation, too. I once read that you could feel your past lives if you concentrated real hard. So I tried it in my hotel room. I wasn’t asleep but kind of in a trance. I lay down quiet and let my mind drift.
All of a sudden I was an Indian woman wearing moccasins and a long buckskin dress and I had my hair in pigtails. Even the sounds and smells were vivid to me. All around me there was a huge field with Indians riding horseback. I was standing next to a mounted Indian—I sensed he was the chief and that he was my husband. I knew he was about to go off into battle, and I was saying good-bye to him. Then a shot rang out, and my husband fell off his horse. I started screaming, and that woke me out of my trance. That’s all I can remember.
In the second such experience, I saw myself dressed up in an Irish costume, doing an Irish dance down a country lane in front of a big white house. But then the telephone rang and the trance ended.
But I know I’ve always had a strong feeling for Indian things, and Irish music has always made me respond in a deep-down way. I know my church doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but sometimes I’m positive I was really an Indian and an Irish girl in times before this one.
Anyway, after Daddy’s funeral, me and Doo went back to Washington State. The next summer, Mommy brought the family to stay with us. It was good to spend some time with them because I’d been away from home almost ten years, and I didn’t hardly know the little ones. This is when I found out that Jack was singing in a hotel club in Wabash. He used to sing on the radio station in Paintsville and now he was singing in public. Peggy and Brenda, the baby, were singing, too. And me, I hadn’t even started yet. But I don’t think that really gave me the idea to start singing. That came later. They stayed with us the summer, and then Mommy went back to her job in Wabash and took the kids with her.
A little later was when Mommy married Daddy’s first cousin, Tommy Butcher. She knew him in Butcher Holler about as long as she knew Daddy. Tommy’s been real good with us. To me, he’s one in a million, and I love him very much. Tommy used to be pretty wild when he was younger, but he’s reformed now and he works in a factory. The only time he’s wild is behind the wheel of a car. Mommy won’t drive with him from Wabash to Nashville because he goes practically a hundred miles an hour the whole way.
Three of the boys live near Mommy and work in the factories around there. Herman, my second brother, sings with a country group in a tavern in Wabash. He’s pretty good, and one of his daughters, named Hermalee, is coming along as a singer, too. Betty Ruth is the only one of my family who lives apart from everybody. She lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her husband is thinking of going into church work.
Four of us, of course, live around Nashville and work in show business. This is a difficult business to make it in, and I’ve tried to encourage ’em and open doors for ’em, but it leads to a lot of problems. There’s only so many who can make it big in show business. Mommy gets caught in the middle because she wants all her kids to get ahead, like any mother, I guess, and she don’t treat me any different from the rest, which is good. The only difference is that I’ve been able to really make it big in Nashville.
Peggy Sue has had some good records and has written some nice songs. Now she’s married to Sonny Wright, who used to be my front man. When they perform together, they’re a good duet.
Jay Lee was my front man when I first started to sing out in Washington. I brought him to Nashville with me after I moved there, and he’s making it on his own. He plays a real good fiddle, and he plays dates on the road.
And Brenda, of course, changed her name to Crystal Gayle and is making it on her own. She used to travel around with me when she was younger, but you’ve got to go on your own sooner or later. Otherwise, people are always comparing you to your big sister, and nobody likes that.
It’s a problem, being related to another performer. We knew this son of a famous man singer—not Hank Williams Junior, by the way—who told a disc jockey, “I’m strictly on my own. I don’t want anybody to judge me by my father.” He said some other things, and he was so nasty about it that, as soon as that boy left the studio, the disc jockey said, “The next sound you hear will be the record breaking.” And he broke it, right on the air. It’s a rough deal all around, them trying to make it when there’s bound to be comparisons.
I know it’s hard on Crystal Gayle, because I can see how she reacts to it. I remember one time, she and I went on the radio together and the disc jockey said to her, “Well, I guess you’re a coal miner’s daughter, too.” He was just trying to make conversation, you know. And Crystal said, “No, I’m not.”
The disc jockey sounded confused and said, well, if we had the same parents, she must be a coal miner’s daughter. But Crystal said, no, she was raised in the city, in Indiana. And it’s the truth. She don’t remember her early days in Kentucky; her ways are different from mine. She married a boy from Wabash named Bill Gotzimos who had long hair. He about scared my family half to death, them thinking Crystal was going with a hippie. But long hair didn’t bother me—I could tell he was a real nice boy from a good family. He was on the honor roll at the University of Indiana. When they got married, he put off his career in psychology to help Crystal with her career.
I’ve tried to do all I could for the three of ’em. I had ’em on Decca Records—now MCA—for a long time, but they couldn’t come up with hit songs regular. I’ve had ’em in my talent agency. But if you help ’em, they feel guilty. If you don’t help ’em, you feel guilty. And me being so close, it’s just natural to want to help.
It must be tough on them. Everywhere they go, people judge them as “Loretta Lynn’s family.” I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. I think probably the best thing is to tell everybody in Nashville that I ain’t opening no doors for my family. That way, when they make it big, they’ll be more proud of themselves. See, even if a singer opens doors for her family, she can’t guarantee they’ll be nice to the fans, or work hard, or show up on time, or write hit songs. One thing Doolittle taught me, which I never forgot, was in the long run you make your own luck—good, bad, or indifferent.
12
Beginner’s Luck
As I sit here tonight, the jukebox playing,
Just a tune about the wild side of life.…
—“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” by J. D. Miller
As you can tell, I’ve always liked to sing. But the singing career was Doolittle’s idea. I was sitting home on our anniversary. I was already twenty-four years old. My oldest girl was ten. I was embroidering pheasants and bird dogs. Doolittle had something on his mind. I could tell because his face gets kind of drawn-in when he’s thinking. He had got me this seventeen-dollar Harmony guitar at Sears and Roebuck for my eighteenth birthday, and I had started to learn to play the thing. This was the first guitar I
ever owned—before, all I’d ever done was hold my brother’s guitar sometimes. Now a few years later, Doo said I had a good voice and he wanted me to sing. What did I think? Well, I was surprised. Stunned, you could say. I didn’t know Doolittle thought that much about my singing. I was proud to be noticed, to tell you the truth, so I went right to work on it. When the kids were in school or asleep at night, I’d sit in my front room, learning how to play the guitar better. I never took no lessons or nothing—I just played. After a while, I got where I could play a pretty good tune on it. First I was singing Kitty Wells’s songs on it, but after a while I started making up my own.
I used to think up songs when I was around nine, but now I started again. My first song was “The Doggone Blues,” a real slow country waltz about a woman whose boyfriend left her. It went:
“I’m so lonely and blue, no one to tell my troubles to.…”
I never got that one published. And it’s a good thing. I look back and I know those darling little songs were pitiful. But at the time I thought they were beautiful.
I think I practiced about two months on that guitar. Then Doolittle started telling me I had to sing in public. It was a big step, because I didn’t think I was ready to face an audience. I was so bashful that if strangers even talked to me I’d turn away, so I sure didn’t want to go singing in public. But he said it was a chance for us to make some extra money, so I kept practicing. He said I could do it, and he said he’d set me up at some club. So I did it—because he said I could. He made all the decisions in those days.
Now that’s what I mean when I say my husband is responsible for my career. It wasn’t my idea: he told me I could do it. I’d still be a housewife today if he didn’t bring that guitar home and then encourage me to be a singer.
Why deny it? Doolittle is a brilliant man, always looking to do something different or better. If we’re off in Kentucky and somebody says the road to Daddy’s graveyard is washed out, Doolittle don’t just grumble about it. He borrows somebody’s bulldozer and goes up and fixes the road. He’s a good worker and a good businessman, too. I’ve always had faith in his judgment that way. When he told me something, I was pretty sure it would probably work out.
So, early in 1960, me and Doo went out to this Delta Grange Hall on a Saturday night to hear some country music. We were with two other couples, friends of ours. The boys like to have a few beers and get a little loud. You know how it is. Anyway, this night, Doo had him a few beers until he went up to the bandleader and said, “Hey, I got a girl here tonight who’s the best country singer there is, next to Kitty Wells, and I ain’t kidding.”
Course they didn’t believe him, you know. They just figured he was some crazy drunk. But he kept pestering them. Me? I was standing near the door, ready to run in case they said yes. But they didn’t—not that night. They said he should bring me over to their house on the next Wednesday and they’d give me a tryout. I was so relieved you couldn’t believe it. I figured Wednesday would never come. But it did, and on Wednesday night Doo brought home a baby-sitter and said, “You ain’t forgotten? You’re singing tonight.” Lord, I could have died. But he just walked me over there, so I had no choice.
It was the house of John and Marshall Penn, two guys in the group called the Westerneers. They opened the door and saw Doolittle, and you could tell by their faces they were thinking, “Oh, it’s you again.” But they let us in. They had this taping equipment for a radio show they did. They asked me what song I knew. I was barely able to say the words. The only song I knew clear through was “There He Goes,” which was a big hit at the time.
The leader asked me, “In what key?”
I didn’t know what a key was and don’t hardly know now. They kept pecking at the keys until I hit one I liked. Then I took off, and they sort of took off after me. I sang the one song and went home. I sure figured, well, that’s that and good riddance.
But the next morning they was a-pecking at my door, and at seven o’clock if you can believe it, asking me if I would sing at the Grange Hall that Saturday night. The Penn brothers said they would pay me five dollars for the show, and they would use the tape on their radio show. I just couldn’t believe it! And then I got scared, real scared. Doolittle told me I was going to sing, scared or not. He told me I was stupid. That made me so mad I made up my mind to sing. I’ve often wondered if that was a psychology trick he played on me.
Saturday came around, and it was a special party at the Grange Hall. The governor of Washington was there in person. We were all supposed to dress in old clothes, like in olden times. I got a dress from a friend of mine—a long white dress that her aunt got married in. It was so old it was turning to yellow. Everybody was waiting on tables before the music began. You know how clumsy I am. Remember, like I told you, my father used to call me “that heifer” when I’d go spilling the coffee. Would you believe they actually made me pour coffee for the governor? My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the cup right at his feet. It broke into a thousand pieces. I’ve been a mess all my life. Its a wonder I’m still going.
But after the dinner came the music part. They introduced me, and I got on the stage. I turned my back to the audience, just like a lady, and bent over to get the pick for my guitar. But I tripped on the long dress and nearly fell off the stage. Oh, it was something! The governor said later it was the best part of the show. I also sang “Tennessee Waltz.” I hadn’t ever been on a stage in my life, and I’m sure I was terrible. But the Penn Brothers invited me back the next Saturday night, paying me another five dollars. I thought I was a millionaire.
There wasn’t too much call for country music in Washington in those days. You had more fans for Perry Como and Doris Day than you did for Ernest Tubb and Kitty Wells. People were kind of ashamed of country. When I’d tell people I liked country music they’d get this look on their faces. In Nashville, we’ve got this saying, “closet country,” meaning you’ve got to enjoy it in secret. That’s almost the way it was back in those days. But the Penn Brothers, with Howard Rodell as the front man, got to be popular and were invited to sing on Friday nights, too. We’d get ourselves a baby-sitter and go wherever they told us.
One time they were playing in the Club Palace in Blaine, Washington. The folks in that tavern were a real tough bunch and they had to sneak me in the back door because I didn’t look old enough to sing in a tavern. I already had four kids, but I acted like a baby; I was so bashful it was pitiful. If Doolittle didn’t keep telling me I was a stupid hillbilly, I never would of made it.
After three or four months, me and Doolittle split off from the Penn Brothers and we formed our own group, playing in Bill’s Tavern on weekends. I played rhythm guitar, which is something I always liked to do. My brother Jack was the lead man, and Roland Smiley played the steel guitar. We called him “Smiley O’Steel.” We were in the Big Time now, we thought—stage names and everything. We got this big coffee pot and painted a picture of a cat on it. That was the kitty, see? If somebody wanted a certain song, they’d drop a nickel or a dime in the kitty and make their request.
We called the group “Loretta’s Trail Blazers,” though Jack said we should have been called “Loretta’s Tail Riders” because I used to ride their tails to do better. But Doolittle was behind the whole thing. He was still working days as a heavy-duty auto mechanic, but he’d come over to Bill’s every night and keep an eye on everything.
Just getting up in front of the audience was a terror. I’d look in their faces and just about freeze up. The announcer would say something to me and I’d be scared of saying a word. When I got established more, I met Little Jimmy Dickens who taught me this trick of not looking at them as individual faces but rather looking at them as a crowd. That way you wouldn’t worry about why somebody was yawning or looking at their wristwatches. When I first started and I’d see them yawning, I’d just go to pieces.
Before long we were playing six nights for Bill Hofstron, who owned the tavern. There wasn’t any slack time but it
was very enjoyable to me because I’d been a housewife since I was thirteen. Now it seemed like I was getting out, the way I would have if I’d gone to high school or not gotten married and stuff. I was learning things and going places I’d never been before.
On Sundays we used to play mental hospitals and Air Force bases and things like that. In one mental hospital, there was this boy around sixteen or seventeen years old who just stared off into space the first time we sang there. The second time, he asked for a cigarette, and one of the boys gave him one. But one of the other patients squashed that lit cigarette right on this boy’s hand, and I felt so bad for him that I went over to talk to him. I could see he was starting to listen a little bit. When I asked him about the hospital he said, “They bring us here and forget about us. This is a world of forgotten people.”
I never forgot those words. When I got home, I wrote a song called “The World of Forgotten People.” Only I made it a love song about myself. I didn’t think country music fans would want to hear a song about a lonely mental patient cooped up in a hospital. People came to our shows and they wanted songs about love. But these days it seems there are songs about other aspects of life. You hear songs that Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall and Merle Haggard write and they’re more about people’s problems. Sometimes I think I could get away with writing “The World of Forgotten People” and make it mental hospitals. But then look at all the trouble I got into for singing “The Pill.” So maybe people aren’t ready for real life.
I sang at the fair in Lynden where I won the canning contest a few years before. During the singing contest, there was a horse-pulling contest under way nearby, and some of the crowd started drifting over to it. I started singing, and they started drifting back. I sang “Gone,” which at the time was a big recording for Ferlin Husky, and I got such a big hand from the audience that I encored with “Fallen Star,” which was the B side of his recording. I got paid twenty-five dollars as a first prize, and me and Doo were so excited we made up our minds then and there to head for Nashville. But believe me, it wasn’t as easy as it might sound.
Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter Page 10
