Loretta Lynn Was Fearless

Lynn, who was famously born to a coal miner in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, in 1932 and gave birth to four of her six children with her husband, Oliver, known as “Doolittle,” by the time she was 19, has meant many things to country music. She was insistent on writing her own songs at a time when even the genre’s closest thing to a feminist anthem, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was written by a man. She was adamant about being an entertainer and reframing the idea of what that could look like: not only a man in a suit (or, now, a trucker hat and jeans) but a woman wielding a guitar and directing her own band.