Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [21]
One time we got a new teacher that had only one arm, and we figured we’d test him out right away. But he made up for the arm he didn’t have with a red paddle, and he just about wore us out. I don’t know how he did it—but we never bothered him again.
Half the time I was fighting with my cousin Marie and other girls. The other half I was fighting with the boys. People are always saying that the reason I got married before I was fourteen was because kids in the mountains get started with boys at an early age. Well, that wasn’t true with me. I never had any boyfriends until Doolittle came along—I was too busy fighting with ’em to have boyfriends. One time I claimed a boyfriend, this little old boy named Granville Bolden. I used to sing out, “I love Granville Bolden,” but I just did that out of meanness.
Fighting was how I got nine whippings in one day. We were playing “may-hide” out behind the school. (Most people call it “hide-and-seek” but we called it “may-hide.” I told you—this is Webb’s Dictionary here.) Anyway, this little cousin of mine, he tagged me, and I got mad and I said, “Why, you little turd, you.”
The teacher heard it, and she gave me a whipping. I was a tough little kid. Mean? I’d die before I let on it hurt. Somebody asked me why I got whipped and I said, “Because I called my cousin a little turd.” Well, that teacher heard me again, and she marched me right back in and whipped me again. That went on until I got whipped nine times in one afternoon. Finally, me and Junior went out the window and ran home. We got a new teacher soon after that, so I was saved.
When I got bigger, I got the job of walking to school early and starting the fire in the potbellied stove. I’d get paid a dollar a month for that. I also cleaned erasers and did little jobs. I was real proud because I was earning money and helping the teacher. I could add four and four and I could read the primer—“There goes Alice. Here comes Spot.” So I’d start teaching the younger ones. We only had a few books and when we got new workbooks one year, we thought we were really something. I went to school clear through the eighth grade. I liked it so much I even repeated the eighth grade. Don’t forget, there wasn’t any ninth grade. But the way education used to be in one-room schoolhouses is about like fourth grade in a regular school.
Another reason I liked school was because we had this program on Friday where the kids performed. Mommy made me a ruffled, red, crepe-paper dress, and I wore it until it fell apart. And I’d get up in front of the class and sing for as long as they let me.
Sometimes people ask me what kind of music we sang back in eastern Kentucky in those days. Well, it was our own music. I know there’s some kind of history to mountain music—like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition, hidden off in the mountains. I know there are folk musicians who come down to the mountains to make tape recordings of the old people singing the old hymns and stuff. But I couldn’t honestly say if we had that kind of music.
Some people even say we talk like people from England or Ireland. Like how I say H in front of some of my words. Like “hain’t” instead of “ain’t.” Well, I just talk how I feel. And singing was the same way. If it was from the other side of the ocean, then that’s the way it was. We didn’t know, nor care very much.
Most of our songs told a story. You could tell me that’s the old-fashioned way people had of telling the news, before newspapers and radio. All I know is, most country songs are ballads. Like we’d sing true songs about somebody getting killed. Mommy taught me a song called “The Great Titanic,” and she taught me how to make motions with my hands to help in telling the story. Like when the ship went down, I’d curve my hands downward.
Another song I sang in my class was about a woman named Luly Barrs who got pregnant by this man, but he wouldn’t marry her. He tied a piece of railroad steel around her neck and threw her into the Ohio River, and they found her three months later. You go back