Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [43]
12
Beginner’s Luck
As I sit here tonight, the jukebox playing,
Just a tune about the wild side of life.…
—“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” by J. D. Miller
As you can tell, I’ve always liked to sing. But the singing career was Doolittle’s idea. I was sitting home on our anniversary. I was already twenty-four years old. My oldest girl was ten. I was embroidering pheasants and bird dogs. Doolittle had something on his mind. I could tell because his face gets kind of drawn-in when he’s thinking. He had got me this seventeen-dollar Harmony guitar at Sears and Roebuck for my eighteenth birthday, and I had started to learn to play the thing. This was the first guitar I ever owned—before, all I’d ever done was hold my brother’s guitar sometimes. Now a few years later, Doo said I had a good voice and he wanted me to sing. What did I think? Well, I was surprised. Stunned, you could say. I didn’t know Doolittle thought that much about my singing. I was proud to be noticed, to tell you the truth, so I went right to work on it. When the kids were in school or asleep at night, I’d sit in my front room, learning how to play the guitar better. I never took no lessons or nothing—I just played. After a while, I got where I could play a pretty good tune on it. First I was singing Kitty Wells’s songs on it, but after a while I started making up my own.
I used to think up songs when I was around nine, but now I started again. My first song was “The Doggone Blues,” a real slow country waltz about a woman whose boyfriend left her. It went:
“I’m so lonely and blue, no one to tell my troubles to.…”
I never got that one published. And it’s a good thing. I look back and I know those darling little songs were pitiful. But at the time I thought they were beautiful.
I think I practiced about two months on that guitar. Then Doolittle started telling me I had to sing in public. It was a big step, because I didn’t think I was ready to face an audience. I was so bashful that if strangers even talked to me I’d turn away, so I sure didn’t want to go singing in public. But he said it was a chance for us to make some extra money, so I kept practicing. He said I could do it, and he said he’d set me up at some club. So I did it—because he said I could. He made all the decisions in those days.
Now that’s what I mean when I say my husband is responsible for my career. It wasn’t my idea: he told me I could do it. I’d still be a housewife today if he didn’t bring that guitar home and then encourage me to be a singer.
Why deny it? Doolittle is a brilliant man, always looking to do something different or better. If we’re off in Kentucky and somebody says the road to Daddy’s graveyard is washed out, Doolittle don’t just grumble about it. He borrows somebody’s bulldozer and goes up and fixes the road. He’s a good worker and a good businessman, too. I’ve always had faith in his judgment that way. When he told me something, I was pretty sure it would probably work out.
So, early in 1960, me and Doo went out to this Delta Grange Hall on a Saturday night to hear some country music. We were with two other couples, friends of ours. The boys like to have a few beers and get a little loud. You know how it is. Anyway, this night, Doo had him a few beers until he went up to the bandleader and said, “Hey, I got a girl here tonight who’s the best country singer there is, next to Kitty Wells, and I ain’t kidding.”
Course they didn’t believe him, you know. They just figured he was some crazy drunk. But he kept pestering them. Me? I was standing near the door, ready to run in case they said yes. But they didn’t—not that night. They said he should bring me over to their house on the next Wednesday and they’d give me a tryout. I was so relieved you couldn’t believe it. I figured Wednesday would never come. But it did, and on Wednesday night Doo brought home a baby-sitter and said, “You ain’t forgotten? You’re singing tonight.” Lord, I could have died. But he just walked me over there,