American country singer Loretta Lynn passed away

Loretta Lynn, the miner’s daughter and moonshine woman who became one of the biggest stars of American country music and a leading feminist in the genre, has died aged 90, her family said on Twitter.

Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, the family said in a statement on Twitter.

“Our dear mother, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, Oct. 4, in her sleep at home on her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the statement said.

“She showed us all how to boldly tell the truth,” country singer-songwriter Carly Pearce wrote on Twitter.

“One of the best there will ever be. I’m singing ‘Dear Miss Loretta’ tonight with a little extra love in the @opry,” Pearce said, referring to the famous Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

In the male-dominated world of country music in the 60s 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 inequalities of male-female relationships and her song “The Pill” celebrated the sexual freedom birth control gave women. She also sang about flirtatious husbands – a subject she knew 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 get up there and say what I thought, what life was about. Everyone else was afraid to do that.”

Lynn’s twangy voice was a fixture on country music radio and honky-tonk jukeboxes in the 1960s and 1970s when she scored hits with songs like “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 over 50 top 10 hits.

Stardom seemed unlikely to Lynn, as she grew up in a coal-rich area of ​​Kentucky known as Butcher Holler, where her miner father died of black lung disease at age 52. Lynn said she was only 13 years old in 1948 when she married 23-Oliver Lynn and by the time she turned 18 she was the mother of four children. However, documents discovered by the Associated Press indicated that she was 15 when she married.

She and her husband—known as Doo, Doolittle, and Mooney for his involvement in the moonshine trade—moved to Washington State in the 1950s, and her music career began to blossom there. On her 24th birthday, Doo gave Lynn a $17 guitar and lots of encouragement. She taught herself to play and began performing on radio stations. In 1960 she had a recording contract and a self-penned hit ‘I’m a Honky-Tonk Girl’.

The couple drove across the United States visiting radio stations to promote her work before landing in the country music capital of Nashville, Tennessee.

Lynn’s relationship with Doolittle was complicated and marred by his drinking and cheating, her drug abuse and mutual violence.

“He never hit me once that I didn’t hit him back twice,” she said in a CBS interview.

But before his death in 1996, Lynn put her career aside for five years to stay at home and take care of her husband.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I was lost without him. I knew I had to keep going, but it was hard.”

Lynn, whose sister Crystal Gayle also became a country star, was the first woman to win the Country Music Association’s “Entertainer of the Year” title in 1972. She has won seven other CMA awards and was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. and won 12 Academy of Country Music Awards.

She has won three Grammy awards as a recording artist – one for the song “After the Fire Is Gone” with longtime duet partner Conway Twitty and two in 2004 for her work on the album “Van Lear Rose”, a collaboration with rocker Jack White of the White Stripes on which she wrote or co-wrote every song.

Lynn’s 1976 autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter” topped the New York Times bestseller list, and Sissy Spacek won an Academy Award for portraying her in a movie of the same name, based on the book.

Much of the film was shot on Lynn’s 1,500-acre ranch, 75 miles west of Nashville, where she maintained a southern mansion. Lynn and her husband bought the town of Hurricane Mills—post office and all—to start the estate on which they raised corn and purebred quarterhorse and gave concerts.

In 2003, Lynn was a Kennedy Center honoree for her contribution to American culture and received a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Lynn suffered a stroke in May 2017, just over two weeks after celebrating her 85th birthday with a two-night stand at the Grand Ole Opry’s historic Ryman Auditorium, and a broken hip in January 2018.