10/04/2022
Queen of Country Music Loretta Lynn is dead at 90.
A statement from the family of Loretta Lynn.
"Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4th, in her sleep at home at her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills.” The family of Loretta Lynn.
— Loretta Lynn (@LorettaLynn) October 4, 2022
Some years ago, when there was an article about a black 29-year-old single mother whose 15-year-old daughter was a second-generation single mother, so she was a grandmother at 29, I noted that Loretta Lynn was famously a grandmother at 29 herself. But you and I didn’t have to pay for that.
The difference is that Loretta was married at 14 (with her parents' permission, required for a woman under 18) so she and her husband were responsible for the expenses involved. Loretta married Oliver Mooney Lynn, a 21-year-old WWII veteran in 1948, and moved to Washington State where her husband had a job. Her daughter was also married when she had two little girls.
That would have been in 1961, or thereabouts, and I remember, word for word, not a stereotype, hearing Loretta say on TV that when she tried to talk her daughter out of marrying that young, the daughter had said, “Well, momma, you done it!”
For one thing, unlike Loretta, the then-16-year-old mother was not planning to be a successful songwriter and singer.
Celia writes rap songs in her spare time, but she does not foresee making a living by doing that. “I want to do computers,” she said, or maybe health occupations.
[Teen pregnancies in Q-C region: Baby starts new role for teenage mom, Quad-City Times, December 2, 2007]
Another difference — instead of signing a permission slip to allow her daughter to marry at 16, as Loretta did, and Loretta’s own father back in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky did, Celia’s mother signed a permission slip allowing her to get a tattoo. (With her rap name on it.)
That was 15 years ago, so for all I know, there’s another generation in the Quad-City area of Iowa/Illinois.
There will not, however, be another Loretta Lynn.
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