Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [69]
I just hollered right back, “Turn that doggone thing back on. I ain’t through yet.” And it got to be the Number One song of the year in Cashbox. We think pretty closely most of the time, though.
It was Owen that provided one of my big thrills in show business. Ernest Tubb, who recorded on Decca, was looking for a duet album, and he had his choice of women singers. Just on Decca alone he could have sung with Kitty Wells or Brenda Lee. But he chose me, after I’d had just a couple of hits. I remember Ernest chose me because, he said, I was an “honest country performer who sang with her heart and soul.” It was a thrill to work with him, and I love him for all he’s done for me. Ernest never tried to hog the songs. He’d just share the melody with me, without getting fancy, and I still think they’re some of the best songs I ever did.
Nowadays I sing my duets with Conway Twitty, but I usually arrange for Ernest to make one tour with me each year. His boys are crazier than my boys are, and they pull some awful stunts. But when I get out on stage with Ernest, I feel like I’m still that little girl huddled on the floor in front of the Philco radio on Saturday night.
21
We Bought the Whole Town
Flies are buzzin’ everywhere; balin’ hay or rockin’ chairs,
Supper’s on, I’m almost there; it’s back to the country life for me.…
—“Back to the Country,” by Tracey Lee
Before I knew it, we were making more money than we’d ever dreamed of. I went from twenty-five dollars a show up to fifty, to a hundred and above. But I still couldn’t believe we had any money.
I still did my own canning and put food away for the winter. I remember telling Grandpa Jones on the Opry one time that I had a bunch of meat and vegetables salted in my smokehouse because, “You never know when this show business is going to go kerflooie.” Once you’ve been poor, you always feel in the back of your mind that you’re going to be poor again.
And suddenly the records started to pay off. That meant Doo could give up his job as a mechanic and take more of an interest in my business.
We rented a little house in Madison, Tennessee, but Doo always wanted his own ranch. I think he would have chucked the whole thing and moved back to Washington if we couldn’t have a ranch. He must have spent six months looking before we finally found a forty-five-acre ranch out in Goodlettsville where he could start the rodeo he always wanted to run. We started to fix up the place for a family of four kids. Ha! We had a surprise coming.
After my first four children were born, the doctor fitted me with a diaphragm to stop having more. The RH thing scared me, too. I didn’t want to take a chance with another birth. But I guess you get careless when you’re on the road, traveling as much as we did. Anyway, late in 1963, I discovered I was pregnant. I couldn’t believe it at first, but the doctor told me it was true.
I suppose this sounds bad the way I say it, but I was unhappy at first. I was just starting to bring in some money, it was getting to be more fun all the time, and now it looked like my career was going to be interrupted or maybe even ended. Plus I was sure my next baby was going to be affected by the RH problem.
I remember bawling when I told the Johnson girls I was pregnant. They told me not to worry, that things would work out for the best. Doo seemed kind of pleased to see there was life in the old boy yet. I cried for nine months, worrying while they gave me shots to control the RH thing.
Then we had another surprise. There were twins in my Mommy’s family, but nobody ever told me that they skip a generation. It was time for twins to pop up again. We had a young