Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [10]
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