Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [47]
The record was fine, but we were pitiful. We didn’t know anything about releasing a record, but we tried our best. Doolittle had a hobby of photography at the time, so he made up a picture of me. We mailed out 3,500 copies of the record and my picture and sent them to every radio station we could find. We had a list of all the country stations—I don’t know how we got that. We even wrote a little bit about my life.
We’d call up the disc jockeys and ask ’em to play the record, and most of ’em did. Those boys have always been on our side. But we couldn’t get the records to the stores fast enough. Someone would hear the record on the jukebox or the radio, then go into a store and ask to buy it—and the owner wouldn’t have it. It was a big mess, but we really tried to get those records out. And all that time, Doolittle was still working at his full-time auto-mechanic’s job in the garage, paying our bills and keeping us alive.
One day in the summer, our steel-guitar man came over to the house and said, “Hey, your record is on the charts.” We were so stupid we didn’t know what the charts meant. But it meant we were in the top ten in some places, based on jukebox plays. The July 25, 1960 Billboard listed us as number fourteen in the national country music charts.
Mr. Burley was pleased with our success and said he would pay for us to go on a promotion trip across the country, all the way to Nashville. And then Mr. Burley said one of the kindest things I’ve ever heard. He said he thought I had a lot of talent and he wanted me to learn as much about the business as I could. And he said that if I ever got a chance to go with a major recording company, he would release me from our contract. He said he never wanted to stand in our way. But I didn’t believe it would ever come to that.
So we took off in our old Mercury, trying to promote the record. We went down the West Coast, too poor to stay in motels, sleeping in the car and eating baloney and cheese sandwiches. To this day I can’t stand any sandwiches for that reason. I ate too many of ’em when I was young. I only had one good dress. When we were driving, I’d just wear jeans or something. We had this list of radio stations and we’d keep turning the dial as we drove. When we got near a station, I’d hop in the back of the car and change into my dress. Then we’d go inside the radio station.
We didn’t care if it was a 500-watt local station or a 50,000-watt clear channel station, we’d hit ’em all. The little stations were better for us. When you’re little, you appreciate someone else who’s little. I was just a nobody. I’d walk into the station and introduce myself. That was hard at first, because I was so bashful. But those disc jockeys were nice to me everywhere. I looked like a kid—my hair was curly back in those days and Doolittle never let me wear any makeup.
At one place I asked if they had my record, and they said no. I looked out of the corner of my eye and spotted it in the garbage can. I asked politely if I could give ’em a copy. They said all right. I walked over to the garbage can and handed ’em the record. They smiled kind of sheepish-like, but ever since then, this studio has been behind me all the way.
I’d stay in those radio stations as long as they let me talk on the air—and there was Doolittle sitting out in the car, listening to me on the radio, getting burned up if I said something dumb. But you know something, I was starting to enjoy myself, meeting all those boys. It was more exciting then than it is now. Nowadays I never stop at country stations anymore because of our tight schedule. And besides, my bus wouldn’t fit in the driveway. It’s such a different deal now.
I remember going into a station in Tucson, Arizona, where the disc jockey was a little boy, same age as me, pimples on his face, greasy hair. He was so nice to me that we used to write letters back and forth until he got into singing, too. Waylon