Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [45]
We called the group “Loretta’s Trail Blazers,” though Jack said we should have been called “Loretta’s Tail Riders” because I used to ride their tails to do better. But Doolittle was behind the whole thing. He was still working days as a heavy-duty auto mechanic, but he’d come over to Bill’s every night and keep an eye on everything.
Just getting up in front of the audience was a terror. I’d look in their faces and just about freeze up. The announcer would say something to me and I’d be scared of saying a word. When I got established more, I met Little Jimmy Dickens who taught me this trick of not looking at them as individual faces but rather looking at them as a crowd. That way you wouldn’t worry about why somebody was yawning or looking at their wristwatches. When I first started and I’d see them yawning, I’d just go to pieces.
Before long we were playing six nights for Bill Hofstron, who owned the tavern. There wasn’t any slack time but it was very enjoyable to me because I’d been a housewife since I was thirteen. Now it seemed like I was getting out, the way I would have if I’d gone to high school or not gotten married and stuff. I was learning things and going places I’d never been before.
On Sundays we used to play mental hospitals and Air Force bases and things like that. In one mental hospital, there was this boy around sixteen or seventeen years old who just stared off into space the first time we sang there. The second time, he asked for a cigarette, and one of the boys gave him one. But one of the other patients squashed that lit cigarette right on this boy’s hand, and I felt so bad for him that I went over to talk to him. I could see he was starting to listen a little bit. When I asked him about the hospital he said, “They bring us here and forget about us. This is a world of forgotten people.”
I never forgot those words. When I got home, I wrote a song called “The World of Forgotten People.” Only I made it a love song about myself. I didn’t think country music fans would want to hear a song about a lonely mental patient cooped up in a hospital. People came to our shows and they wanted songs about love. But these days it seems there are songs about other aspects of life. You hear songs that Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall and Merle Haggard write and they’re more about people’s problems. Sometimes I think I could get away with writing “The World of Forgotten People” and make it mental hospitals. But then look at all the trouble I got into for singing “The Pill.” So maybe people aren’t ready for real life.
I sang at the fair in Lynden where I won the canning contest a few years before. During the singing contest, there was a horse-pulling contest under way nearby, and some of the crowd started drifting over to it. I started singing, and they started drifting back. I sang “Gone,” which at the time was a big recording for Ferlin Husky, and I got such a big hand from the audience that I encored with “Fallen Star,” which was the B side of his recording. I got paid twenty-five dollars as a first prize, and me and Doo were so excited we made up our minds then and there to head for Nashville. But believe me, it wasn’t as easy as it might sound.
Doolittle decided to get me on the Buck Owens television show up in Tacoma, Washington. Buck was just starting singing in those days and he wasn’t the big name he is today. But his show was pretty important in that part of the country. He was playing in a rough place, the Pantania Club, on weekends, and we drove up there and Doolittle started telling him how good I was. Buck kept saying I should come back for amateur night the next night but Doolittle kept saying, “Man, I can’t afford to stay over. This is our only night in Tacoma.” So Buck let me sing one song, and he must have liked it because he let me sing another. Finally he came over and sat down with us and said we should really stay over for his amateur television show on Saturday night. Doolittle decided maybe we’d better manage it somehow.
The next day