Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [31]
Daddy said that I was awful young to be thinking about getting married. Doo said he knew that, but he’d take real good care of me. They didn’t exactly say yes, but I knew we were gonna do it. After Doo went home, Mommy and Daddy cried all night and didn’t hardly talk to me.
Daddy did make Doo promise not to whip me, and not to take me too far from home. And Mommy told me, “This is something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
Well, there have been times when I thought Mommy was right, and there’s been times when I knew she was wrong. But on that particular day, I was just gonna go ahead and get married. Mommy told me later that the reason she let me get married was she knew if it was her, she’d have gone out and gotten married anyway. She said I always looked older and acted older than my age. So she knew there was no sense arguing.
We got married Saturday, January 10. I remember Mommy’s Cherokee father, Nathaniel Ramey, rocking on the front porch. He never said much, but he looked at Doolittle and said, “You be good to my little girl, or I’ll kill you.” Doolittle seemed impressed, because he knew that Indians never make promises they don’t keep.
I was wearing my aunt’s dress and my mother’s shoes. The dress hung down below my knees. I had to be the ugliest bride you ever saw. We just went down to the county courthouse in Paintsville to the judge and got it done. We didn’t have a ring. I didn’t know nothing about rings. In fact, I never had a ring until after I started singing and the guys would come around and try to date me. They’d say, “Well, you don’t have no ring on.” So Doo went out and bought a ring just to let them know I was married.
But on our wedding night we weren’t that organized. We got there at eight o’clock, but Daddy didn’t come down until eleven o’clock to give me away. He stood in the back of the room and didn’t say a word. Mommy didn’t even come down. She’s never been to any weddings except my sister Brenda’s, and I haven’t gone to any of my kids’ weddings either. It just makes me nervous—I don’t know why.
At our wedding, Doo wrote down his name as Oliver Vanetta Lynn, and I said, “Who’s that?” See, I thought his real name was Doolittle.
We were taking our honeymoon at Chandler’s Cabins, about seventeen miles from Paintsville. But before we could leave, Marie’s daddy got in Doo’s jeep and said he was coming with us on our honeymoon. I didn’t know what we were gonna do, but Doo gave him a pint of Fat Messer’s best moonshine and let him off on the highway somewhere. Then we went on our honeymoon.
Before we get any further along, let me say that I didn’t have much of an idea what a honeymoon was all about. Doo was the first boy I ever went with, and I didn’t go with him long enough to know what was going on. My parents never told me nothing. Now I was different with my girls. I told ’em the facts straight off. My Daddy used to tell me they got me by turning over a cabbage leaf—and I believed it. I’m sure my little twins know more than I did when I got married. I think a mother should talk to her girls about it. But that was a different time back then.
So, we drove to these cabins, which were nothing fancy, just a little bunch of cabins side by side. But I thought it was the end of the world. I guess I was a little nervous. We got into that little cabin, and I was shaking like I was freezing. Doolittle turned on the radiator and I sat right down on it, wrapped in my little red teddy bear coat, the only coat I owned. I just kept shivering, even when the heat went up. My husband, he went to bed. He was wearing shorts and one of them undershirts with no sleeves. I was embarrassed just to look at him. He said, “Can’t you come to bed?”
I said, “I’m freezing to death!” But I know it was nerves. His mother had bought me