The Shadow
When I was born in Floyd County in the Beaver Valley Hospital in Martin, Ky. five months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Loretta Lynn was a nine-year-old growing up in Butcher’s Holler.
Butcher’s Holler is near the City of Paintsville in Johnson County which borders Floyd County about 35 miles from Martin, and my ties with the City of Paintsville revolve around baseball.
As an Eagle outfielder at Morehead State University, I was recruited by Ford Ferguson, the manager of Paintsville’s semi-pro baseball team, to play center field for Paintsville, and our team won the Mountain Valley League the summer of 1960.
During the same summer, Loretta Lynn, who died in her sleep in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. at 90 on Oct. 4, released her first song on Zero Records, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” It was a song that she wrote, and it became a hit.
By the end of her Nashville music career, she had recorded 86 singles, 2-B-Sides, 14 music videos and been inducted into the Nashville Song Writers Hall of Fame, 1983; elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, 1988; and inducted into the Austin City Limits’ Hall of Fame, 2015.
Early in her country music career, she teamed up with Conway Twitty, and the couple became world famous for their duets after recording such hits as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” “After the Fire Is Gone,” “It’s Only Make Believe,” “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” “As Soon as I Hang Up the Phone,” “Back Street Affair,” “Easy Loving,” “Faded Love” and “I Can’t Help if I’m Still in Love with You.”
Conway passed away in 1993, and Loretta Lynn’s husband, Oliver Vanetta “Doolittle” Lynn, who was often called “Moody;” died in 1996. Loretta and Moody had six children, and nearly 10 years passed before Loretta resumed her recording career after Moody’s death.
Loretta penned and recorded “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in 1969, and the song about her father being a coal miner who lived in Butcher’s Holler reached No. 1 on Billboard’s song charts.
Mary Elizabeth Sissy Spacek, the singer and actress who portrayed Loretta in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” won an Academy Award for her role as Loretta in the 1980 Hollywood film.
Known for tackling taboo subjects in some of the songs she wrote, Loretta co-wrote “The Pill” with Lorene Allen, Don McHan and J.D. Bayless in 1975. “The Pill” became controversial and was banned from country music radio stations.
Some other 1960’s hits recorded by Loretta are “Blue Kentucky Girl,” 1965; “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man), 1966; “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’(with Lovin’ on Your Mind),”1967; and “Fist City,” 1968.
“You’re Lookin’ at Country,” and “One’s on the Way,” were hits for Loretta in 1971, and “Love Is the Fountain,” 1973; charted for her as well.
Loretta won three Grammys: Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo with Conway Twitty for “After the Fire Is Gone,” (1971); Best Country Album in 2005 and Country Collaboration with Vocals in 2005.
Paintsville remains the site of cherished memories for me in that in 1963, I played center field for the City of Morehead’s semi-pro baseball team that won the Kentucky State Semi-Pro Championship at Paintsville where I batted .333 with a three-run home run.
Recalling the summer of 1960, Loretta enjoyed her first hit, and I enjoyed going 4-5 in Paintsville’s victory over Drift where my former teammates were my opponents on the Fourth of July. I enjoyed my best-ever offensive game by hitting two home runs, a double, and a single in five times at bat to drive in five runs and score three times.
Sixty-two years later, I have a connection to country music in that I serve as the director of The Virginia Opry that the Commonwealth of Virginia designated on March 31, 2020, as its official Opry. Appalfolks of America Association, the nonprofit organization that I founded in 1985, founded The Virginia Opry on Oct. 17, 1992, and our troupe has grown from 10 to 60 members who comprise 10 bands.
I have visited Loretta’s cabin where she grew up in Butcher’s Holler, and recently, I traveled to Paintsville on U.S. Route 23, Country Music Highway. There, Loretta Lynn’s name is prominently displayed on a road sign not far from Butcher’s Holler.
In 1913, President Barack Obama awarded Loretta the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a ceremony in the White House.
