The legendary ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ Loretta Lynn, performs at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe on May 12
From a press release:
It was announced today that living country music legend Loretta Lynn will perform at Penn’s Peak in Jim Thorpe on Friday, May 12, 2017 at 8 p.m.
Tickets, which are $47 for regular seats and $52 for premium seats, go on sale next Saturday, Oct. 29 at 10 a.m. and will be available at all Ticketmaster outlets, the Penn’s Peak box office (325 Maury Rd., Jim Thorpe), and Roadies Restaurant and Bar (325 Maury Rd., Jim Thorpe). Penn’s Peak box office and Roadies Restaurant ticket sales are walk-up only; no phone orders.
“To make it in this business, you either have to be first, great, or different,” says Loretta Lynn. “And I was the first to ever go into Nashville, singin’ it like the women lived it.”
Lynn first arrived in Nashville 55 years ago, signing her first recording contract on Feb. 1, 1960, and within a matter of weeks, she was at her first recording session. A self-taught guitarist and songwriter, Lynn became one of the most distinctive performers in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s, shaking things up by writing her own songs, many of which tackled boundary-pushing topics drawn from her own life experiences as a wife and mother.
In addition to being first, she was also great and different. Loretta Lynn’s instantly recognizable delivery is one of the greatest voices in music history. As for different, no songwriter has a more distinctive body of work. In lyrics such as “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’” and “Your Squaw Is on the War Path,” she refused to be any man’s doormat. She challenged female rivals in “You Ain’t Woman Enough” and “Fist City.” She showed tremendous blue collar pride in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “You’re Lookin’ at Country.” She is unafraid of controversy, whether the topic is sex (“Wings Upon Your Horns”), divorce (“Rated X”), alcohol (“Wouldn’t It Be Great”), or war (“Dear Uncle Sam”). “The Pill,” her celebration of sexual liberation, was banned by many radio stations. Like the lady herself, Lynn’s songs shoot from the hip.
As millions who read her 1976 autobiography or saw its Oscar-winning 1980 film treatment are aware, Lynn is a “Coal Miner’s Daughter” who was raised in dire poverty in a remote Appalachian Kentucky hamlet. Living in a mountain cabin with seven brothers and sisters, she was surrounded by music as a child.
“I thought everybody sang, because everybody up there in Butcher Holler did,” she recalls. “Everybody in my family sang. So I really didn’t understand until I left Butcher Holler that there were some people who couldn’t. And it was kind of a shock.”
She famously married Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn when she was a barely schooled child of 13. “Doo” was a 21-year-old war veteran with a reputation as a hell raiser. When she was seven months pregnant with her first child, they moved far away from Appalachia to Custer, Washington. By age 18, she had four children (two more, twins, came along in 1964). Isolated from her native culture and burdened with domestic work, she turned to music for solace.
“Before I was singing, I cleaned house; I took in laundry; I picked berries. I worked seven days a week. I was a housewife and mother for 15 years before I was an entertainer. And it wasn’t like being a housewife today. It was doing hand laundry on a board and cooking on an old coal stove. I grew a garden and canned what I grew. That’s what’s real. I know how to survive.”
Lynn is one of the most awarded musicians of all time. She has been inducted into more music Halls of Fame than any female recording artist, including the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and was the first woman to be named the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year in 1972. Lynn received Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She has won four Grammy Awards (including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010) and sold more than 45 million records worldwide.
On March 4, 2016, Legacy Recordings released “Full Circle,” Lynn’s first new studio album in over 10 years. Produced by Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash and recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, “Full Circle” takes listeners on a journey through Lynn’s musical story, from the Appalachian folk songs and gospel music she learned as a child, to new interpretations of her classic hits and country standards, to songs newly written for the project.
That same month, PBS also broadcast the nationwide premiere of a new documentary about Lynn’s remarkable life and career called “American Masters — Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.” The film explores the country legend’s hard-fought road to stardom. From her Appalachian roots to the Oscar-winning biopic of her life, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn struggled to balance family and her music career and is still going strong over 50 years later.
