Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [2]
Butcher Holler still means a lot to me. That’s something that’ll never change. My brother lives back there, right down from the old home, and he takes people on trips to the old house. When I was a little girl, Daddy had an old battery radio—I wonder if people even know what that is nowadays!—that he bought when he got his job in the coal mines. And every Saturday night we sat around and listened to the Grand Ole Opry. I know everybody’s listening to iPods now but in a lot of ways, I still feel like I’m living back in those times. It just doesn’t seem to me like that time has passed. Everyone from my past is still with me—either right here with me or with me in my memory—so really, I’m still in Kentucky. I think that affects my music and I think you can hear that in the songs I write and sing. There was a time, when I first started singing country music, that everybody was trying to go pop. Everybody was going pop on me and I was just about as country as I could get. I thought: Hold it! Don’t run off and leave me! But I’m still around and still doing what I do and love. Some of these new country singers aren’t really country. I think some of them ought to be singing pop music and just leave country alone. You don’t have to see them, you can hear it. It is what it is, I guess, but I’d still rather they just let the ones that sing country sing country.
I’m still touring. You know, a lot of entertainers think it’s so rough—that the road is hard. I never felt that way. Going on the road to perform, that’s my job. That’s what I do, same as people who go to an office or work in a store or who still work in the mines. I get tired now and then—but, come on, at my age I’m allowed to get a little tired. Hey, life can make you tired sometimes. Mommy would always tell me, “You can be somebody if you work hard.” And she was right. Mommy was always right. I don’t overdo it anymore, I kind of keep down the number of tour dates, so maybe I don’t work quite as hard as I used to. But when I work, I work hard. My twins come on the road with me, and my son. Singing and performing are just in the family, I guess. In the blood. I don’t know what I’d do if they weren’t there. I never had it any other way. My sister Crystal still sings on her own tours. And my sister Peggy Sue does harmony with her. Like I said: in the blood.
Since I’m telling y’all how my life has changed in the last thirty years, you should know—and you probably already heard—that my husband, Doo, passed away in 1996. I really miss Doo, and it’s too bad he didn’t live to be with me when I can spend more time at home. Before he passed, I had to work a lot. And I mean a lot. Somebody had to pay the bills, that’s the way life is. But I wish he was still with us so we could spend some time together. He’d like what’s going on at the ranch. I spend more time with my family. My kids make me happy. So do my grandkids. My house is like Grand Central Station, but I don’t mind. I was raised with seven kids; there were eight of us when I was little, so I’ve always had a big family around and it makes me happy to be surrounded by family. And don’t be thinking we live some fancy existence. We don’t. I ain’t no different from anybody else. I’m my own cook. And I do my own gardening. I plant my vegetables myself. I’m growing radishes and onions and a lot of other good stuff out of it right now.
The ranch keeps me busy. You might have heard that we had some monster floods here in Tennessee. We were surrounded by water. The only thing that the flood didn’t hit was the house because it’s way up high. But everywhere else you looked, nothing but water. It scared me to death. I’m scared of water anyway, because I can’t swim. I almost drowned once, so since then I kind of stay away from the stuff. The flood did some real damage on the ranch. It took out a big bridge. It was really something. This iron bridge that we had in this