Loretta Lynn was a 27-year-old mother of four the first time she went onstage. It was her late husband's idea. In a 1998 television interview with Roseanne Barr, she candidly described the earliest days of her career, when her husband, Oliver V. Lynn Jr., who also went by Mooney, Doolittle, and Doo, brought home a $17 guitar and told her to learn to play it. She also explained the reason why—despite the migraines she got every time—she felt compelled to perform.
"Let's put it like this," she said, "I had four kids, and if one of 'em made a mistake—the little boogers would get into things during the day and I couldn't whip 'em, I couldn't whip them to save my life—I'd say, 'Soon as your daddy comes home, he'll kill ya, I'm gonna tell him,' and it didn't take but a couple times that I quit that, because when he'd come home, he'd whip them, and he'd give me one, too."
Barr seemed enamored by Lynn's frankness, mystified by the notion that a young Loretta Webb might not have wanted to become country star Loretta Lynn. "So you went onstage to sing," she said, "because you thought he was gonna kick your butt if you didn't?" Probing further, she asked, "You didn't ever like it?"
"Well, no," Lynn answered, "because I hadn't ever done it. You gotta realize, where I come from, Roseanne, was way back in the mountains." She went on to explain that when she and Doo moved to a logging town in Washington State, she rarely left the house. "One time I went to the grocery store and was scared to death to go in," she said. "He'd usually pick up a few groceries on the way home from work."
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