Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [50]
When I’m around them girls, we just sit around and tease each other something fierce. Loretta sings in shows sometimes, and I’ll swear she acts more like she was in show business than I do. She’ll dress up with sexy halters and tight clothes and stuff—things I won’t do. They’re always trying to talk me into wearing more modern clothes. I know what they mean by “modern.” They’d poke fun at those long dresses I used to wear, with their high necklines. Loretta bought me a short skirt one time. She still makes fun of the way I looked in the mirror and said, “Oh, my God, you can see my kneecaps!”
Loretta just does whatever comes into her mind. My writer, George, won’t ever forget the first time he met her at my ranch. She brought some homemade pecan pie from Colorado and asked him if he wanted some. He said he did. She made him hold out his hand, no plate, no napkin, just sticky pecan pie. She laughed for an hour.
Those girls have done everything for me. Sometimes I love to travel with ’em in their car, just like in the old days. Just them and their Daddy. We’ll follow my bus from one place to another. We’ll even go into a restaurant, just the five of us, and maybe nobody will even recognize me. Then we’ll have a good time just drinking Coke and eating cheeseburgers and talking about the old days when I was breaking in. And if someone comes over for an autograph, Loretta will say, “Hey, can’t you see we’re eating?” Or maybe Loudilla and Kay will talk to that person, so I can finish eating. They are very protective of me. I wish I could take ’em with me full time. But they have their own lives, running the ranch for their Daddy. I call him “Daddy” myself.
After they met me, those little country girls would travel around their area, asking for my records on the jukeboxes. If my records weren’t on the jukeboxes, they put ’em there. And when I signed at Decca, they started this fan club for me. There was an early fan club run by Mary Ann Cooper, but that didn’t work out too good. So the Johnson sisters organized one, and they had the right touch. They ran it for four years, spending their own money before they finally had to ask for help, which I gave ’em. Mack Johnson bought a typewriter and a mimeograph machine worth over $450. Now they put out a bulletin a few times a year, giving my schedule and running a letter from me, plus all kinds of gossip about the show and other people in the business. And they’re always plugging my records.
We have a get-together of fans every year in a different place, with them traveling from all over the country just to attend. We’re real close—whereever I go, the fan presidents visit me. I get a chance to say “Thank you” just before the Fan Fair—a convention for over 10,000 fans—every year in June. My fan club presidents and Conway Twitty’s are invited to a banquet at one of the big hotels in Nashville. Jimmy Jay from my booking agency cooks a pig for two days, getting that thick barbecue sauce all over it. Everybody helps themselves to potato salad and cole slaw and all the soda they can drink, and I just sit there and get barbecue sauce all over my face from kissing everybody for all the help they’ve been. By the time we go home, we’re all full of sauce, just a bunch of country bumpkins. And that’s the way we like it.
You never know what’s going to happen the week of Fan Fair. Last year, at about eight o’clock on Sunday morning, we got a phone call from Joyce Perkins, the president of our club in Westwego, Louisiana. She said she had just driven up from Louisiana with a load of stuffed crab—she cooks Cajun style—and she asked if she could bring it out to the ranch. Well, Doolittle could never refuse an offer like that. Joyce brought out these huge trays of food—better than anything you could buy in a restaurant—and Doo and George, my writer, ate all of it that night.
Sometimes the fans get to be a little too much during that week of Fan Fair. They just pop into the kitchen while we’re sitting around. It sounds