Nowadays, everyone knows Loretta Lynn as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Lynn earned the nickname following the immense success of her autobiographical number one hit single of the same name.
But as Lynn shared in a recent interview with AARP, she didn’t really feel like “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” until after she wrote the song. Even though Lynn always knew that she was the child of a coal miner, she didn’t consider it unusual growing up.
“It wasn’t an easy life, but you didn’t know that,” she said. “Everybody lived that way.“
Once Lynn started to make her way into the country music scene in 1970, she released two successful singles back to back, called “I Know How” and “You Wanna Give Me a Lift.”
During a dinner break while performing on the Wilburn Brothers Show, Lynn went back to her dressing room and picked up her guitar. She strummed a few notes, and before she knew it, she was singing “well I was born a coal miner’s daughter.”
Needless to say, Lynn continued what she started and ended up writing a new tune, which would later go on to become her signature song.
Originally, the song had four other verses, but Lynn was advised to cut them out to make the song shorter. Afterwards, Lynn lost the original verses, and has never found them again. Despite that, Lynn says she still plans to recut the song in the future with four additional verses, even if they aren’t exactly the same as the ones she wrote so many years ago.
For a while after the song’s release, Lynn was worried about her reputation as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and if others would look down on her because of it.”One time, I worried that people thought that I wasn’t a good person because I was a coal miner’s daughter, they’d think I was poor,” she said.
But as we now know, the opposite happened. Everyday people found it easy to connect to Lynn because of her humble upbringing, and they embraced “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” with open arms.
“That’s all I go by now,” Lynn said with a smile.
You can watch Lynn’s full interview in the video below.
