Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [88]
Then one day we were sitting in the airport and I wandered over to see if they had the magazine. I took one look at the cover and, boy, was I shocked! I didn’t know it was that kind of magazine. I wanted to see it but I was too bashful to buy it from the lady. So I got my bus driver, Jim Webb, to buy it. I was afraid maybe they caught me in some picture without my clothes on, except I’m so skinny, they’d be out of luck. As far as I know, there’s only one set of nude pictures of me in the world. They were taken by Doolittle when I was around sixteen. He had converted one of our rooms into a darkroom, and he got me to pose for him. We’ve talked about burning ’em, but we decided to keep ’em under lock and key. We take ’em out once in a while, just for a laugh. But Penthouse didn’t get a-hold of them, and their story was pretty nice.
By now, my career was really rolling along. I had little singing parts in four movies: Forty Acre Feud, Music City, USA, Nashville Rebel, and Nashville Sound, and I was the first woman country artist to receive a Gold Album for one million sales—for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” which I wrote with my sister.
But I don’t always write all my songs. Sometimes we get songs from fellows like Shel Silverstein. Now, he isn’t what I’d call country. He’s bald and he’s got a beard and from what I hear he spends a lot of time at Playboy king Hugh Hefner’s houses in Chicago and Los Angeles. Plus, he’s got himself a houseboat out in Sausalito, California. But he knows how to write country songs. Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” is one of Shel’s songs, and he wrote “One’s on the Way.” I recorded that one, and it turned out to be a smash. Shel also wrote “Hey, Loretta,” which I didn’t like because I don’t care for songs about myself. He heard that I wasn’t going to do it and flew in from Alaska. We finally put it on an album, but the disc jockeys demanded that we also make it a single. I got to like it—especially when it got to be Number One.
But people got to know me best after I wrote my life story on that song “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” That really made me familiar to people—it gave me a title they could remember. And it told everybody that I could write about something else besides marriage problems.
I’m proud that other writers like that song. I’d always wanted to write a song about growing up, but I never believed anybody would care about it. One day I was sitting around the television studio at WSIX, waiting to rehearse a show. I figured this was a good time to work on a song. I went off to the dressing room and just wrote the first words that came into my head.
It started “Well, I was borned a coal miner’s daughter …” which was nothing but the truth. And I went on from there. I made up the melody at the same time, line by line, like I always do. It started out as a bluegrass thing, ’cause that’s the way I was raised, with the guitar and the banjo just following along. Really, the way you hear it on the record is the way I imagined it.
I had a little trouble with the rhymes. I had to match up words like “holler” and “daughter” and “water.” But after it was all done, the rhymes weren’t so important.
In a couple of hours, I had nine of the best verses I ever wrote. The next time I had a recording session, I did that song. But you know what? We kept it in the can for a year. I didn’t believe anybody would buy a song just about me.
When they finally released it and had to cut three verses, like I said before, it just about broke my heart. One verse was about Mommy papering the walls with magazines, right above my head, with pictures of movie stars and such. Another was how the creek would rise every time it rained, and Daddy would have to cut logs across, so we could get downhill. The third was about hog-killing day in December, so we’d have fresh