Loretta Lynn: Heartaches and High Notes

“Doo had told me he was going to take me somewhere on Saturday night,” Ms. Lynn said. “I had my hair all pin-curled up, and he came in, and he was drinking. And I knew he wasn’t going to take me nowhere. I set Ernest Ray down on the floor. And I started walking away from Doo, and he got me by one of my pin curls. I still had Cissy in my arms ’cause she was just a little tiny thing.

“And I came around with my fist to hit him on the shoulder, but I hit him in the mouth and knocked three teeth out. There was a hardwood floor, and, I’m telling you, the teeth broke into tiny little pieces and it seemed like they just kept falling. Click-clack-clack-clack. I thought: ‘I’m dead. I am dead. I am completely dead.’ But you know, he never said a word.”

“I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything,” she said. “But when you get to hear the song, you just grin.”

“I wrote songs about how I was feeling at the time,” she said. “If I was in a fighting mood about some old gal trying to take my husband, I wrote about it. And she knew about it. The whole world knew about it then.”

Ms. Lynn added: “The more you hurt, the better the song is. You put your whole heart into a song when you’re hurting. You can’t be protected. I didn’t try to be protected. I didn’t want to be protected. When I wrote a song like that, I was mad, and somebody else needed protection, not me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/arts/music/loretta-lynn-mines-a-legacy-of-heartaches-and-high-notes.html