NEW YORK: Loretta Lynn, the coal miner’s daughter and moonshiner’s wife who became one of American country music’s biggest stars and a leading feminist in the genre, died on Tuesday at the age of 90, her family said on Twitter.
Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, the family said in a statement posted on Twitter.
“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the statement said.
“She showed us all how to unapologetically tell the truth,” country music singer-songwriter Carly Pearce wrote on Twitter.
“One of the greatest there ever will be. I’ll be singing ‘Dear Miss Loretta’ with a little extra love tonight at the @opry,” Pearce said, referring to the famed Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.
In the male-dominated world of country music in the 1960s and ‘70s, Lynn built a reputation as a hillbilly feminist who was bold enough and talented enough to write her own songs. In “Rated X” she sang about the inequities of man-woman relationships and her song “The Pill” celebrated the sexual freedom that birth control gave women. She also sang about philandering husbands - a subject she knew about personally.
Lynn told an interviewer that 14 of her songs had been banned by radio stations.
“I wasn’t the first woman in country music,” she told Esquire magazine in 2007. “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about. The rest were afraid to.”
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