Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [54]
Besides, if I wasn’t married I couldn’t do the same things I do now. I couldn’t be friendly with a lot of men, hug ’em and tell ’em I love ’em. They might take it the wrong way, and that would spoil things for me.
But sometimes men take your personality wrong. They see me up on the stage and they think I’m just waiting for their telephone call. Like this doctor from Texas who followed me around whenever I played that part of the country. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’d be calling up and wanting to meet me. One night I was taking a bath and he called me from the lobby and said, “Well, I’ve found you.” I didn’t know how he got my room number, but he did. He said he wanted to watch TV in my room. I said it was too late, the TV was off.
He said he wanted to talk, so I said he could talk on the phone. Then he started telling me about his troubles with his wife, which is about the worst approach a man can use. I said, “Why don’t you write to Dear Abby?” He hung up, and I haven’t heard from him since. But he knows who he is.
But just because you don’t go for that kind of stuff, doesn’t mean it’s not there. You just look around you. That’s why I think country music is so popular with ordinary people. Because not everybody can appreciate poetry or classical music, and they don’t like words that say one thing and mean another thing. Country music is real. Country music tells the story the way things are. People fall in love and then one of ’em starts cheating around, or both of ’em sometimes. And usually there’s somebody who gets hurt. Our country songs are nothing but the truth. That’s why they’re so popular.
It’s like that song Conway Twitty and I did in 1974, “As Soon As I Hang Up the Phone.” It starts with the phone ringing and Conway, in a choking kind of voice, tries to tell me good-bye. Now, for a while, I don’t pay any attention to what he’s saying, but he keeps bringing the subject back to him leaving. Finally he says it’s true, and I sing, “Ohhhh, noooo.…”
Now how many people have gotten bad news on the phone about their man or woman? Lots. And I bet most of ’em react the way I do in that song. Well, that song started being played on the jukeboxes over and over again because it was real.
You just look around at the problems that people keep having. Divorces and split-ups and extra boyfriends and girl friends all over the place. I don’t know how they find the time for it. And another reason country songs are so popular: some of the songs are about ourselves, really. We ain’t no better than anybody else.
As for me, I ain’t slept with nobody except my husband. I’m always getting letters from Conway’s fans who say I was responsible for breaking up his marriage. Those fans hear Conway and me singing on our records, or they know that we’re partners in a talent agency. But that’s the only way we’re partners. I’ve heard rumors about me and every singer in country music. There were even rumors about me and Ernest Tubb, and he’s like a father to me. As far as I’m concerned, Ernest Tubb hung the moon. But my friends know me better than that. I also know you don’t have to sleep with anybody to make it in this business. If I do sleep with anybody, it will be for my own accord. Like I told that redhead back in 1961, that ain’t the way my Mommy and my Daddy raised me.
16
Music City, U.S.A.
I’ll dress up like a movie star,
And purty up my hair
And no one here is gonna know,
What I’ll be doing there.…
—“Hey, Loretta,” by Shel Silverstein
That experience with the redhead taught us to be more careful about our contacts, but it didn’t stop us from trying to make it in Nashville. I guess I went at it like a bull in a china shop, the same way I am about everything—all energy. I’d be on people’s doorsteps at eight in the morning, holding copies of my first record and of new songs I’d written.
People started calling me “Colonel Parker” because that was the name of the man who promoted Elvis Presley. Well, I was no Colonel Parker, but I sure could have used one. I was wearing a ninety-nine