If not for one holiday song, country music might have never had a Loretta Lynn. In a 2007 interview with Esquire magazine, Lynn reveals it was a Christmas carol that ultimately led to her iconic career.
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Lynn was just a teenager, already married to Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, with babies, when her husband suggested she become a country music singer.
"Doo told me I could sing," Lynn tells Esquire. "Well, I knew better. I knew I couldn't sing, but he come in and catch me singing, like when the baby's asleep. And the only thing I knew very much of was 'White Christmas.' That's the song he [would] catch me singing. He come home one day and said, 'Loretta, you're a better singer than all these girls out there making money. I'm gonna put you on the road or get you a job in the tavern, and you can sing for two years, and we'll buy us a home. Then you can quit.'"
Lynn ultimately found plenty of success, but not at all in the time frame Dolittle predicted.
"Two years from that day, we didn't have enough money to buy us a hamburger," she recalls.
Loretta Lynn And Her Legacy In Country Music
Loretta Lynn is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists in country music, of all time. It is Lynn who helped pave the way for future female artists, by standing up for what she believed in. Lynn released a song called "The Pill" in 1975, a song that was highly controversial at the time.
"You know I sung it three times at the Grand Ole Opry one night," Lynn later said (via American Songwriter). "And I found out a week later that the Grand Ole Opry had a three-hour meeting, and they weren't going to let me [sing it]. If they hadn't let me sing the song, I'd have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry."
Lynn passed away on October 4, 2022. Lynn was 90 years old when she died.
"She was overjoyed, we were broken," her family said on the one-year anniversary of her passing. "She had warned us just days before that the angels were coming, but we dismissed it."
"At 90, we knew the moment was inevitable," they continued. "We had watched her age and her health decline. The stroke, the fall, then the pandemic that isolated everyone had all taken their toll. Yet, in the midst of it all she fought through, overcame odds. Kept recording hit albums, wrote books, gave us advice, made us laugh, and kept us together."
